Challenges. The ASCLEPIOS proposal identified three key cybersecurity challenges. (1) Many of the existing cybersecurity approaches fail to protect users’ data against attacks that originate from inside and/or external adversaries. (2) Healthcare practitioners and researchers want to analyse healthcare and medical data while preserving privacy and providing security. (3) A new generation of healthcare and medical devices is emerging in which some hardware components are replaced by software, so users cannot attest the trustworthiness of these devices and must rely on the assurances of device vendors, operators, and maintainers.
Objectives. The vision of ASCLEPIOS was to maximize and fortify the trust of users on cloud-based healthcare services by developing mechanisms to protect sensitive corporate and personal data. The project addressed the above listed key challenges targeting the following main objectives. (1) Creating cybersecurity solutions based on Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE), Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) and Attribute-based Access Control (ABAC) to prevent unauthorized access to data stored in both local and remote storages. (2) Elaborating a novel solution that enables users in the Healthcare sector to run Functional Encryption (FE) enabled analytics on healthcare and medical data in a privacy-preserving and secure way. (3) Developing new attestation protocols to check trustworthiness of healthcare and medical devices.
To achieve these objectives the project developed the ASCLEPIOS framework which integrates cybersecurity services based on ABE, ABAC, SSE and FE schemes and medical device attestation. To showcase the ASCLEPIOS achievements the project implemented three near-production level demonstrators for acute stroke response, sleep disorder and antibiotics prescription analytics. The use cases are provided by the ASCLEPIOS medical partners and involve leading European hospitals.
