CICI-SECTOR Project

SECTOR: Building a SEcure and Compliant Cyberinfrastructure for Translational Research

Project Objectives

1. we will design a framework to enable fine-grained access and privacy control that are compliant with the HIPAA technical safeguards, where cryptographic primitives such broadcast encryption, key regression, attribute-based encryption, and software defined networking be adopted to address security and network issues in the integration of geo-scattered medical data silos;
2. we will design consensus-level protocols for permissioned blockchain to scale up its throughput to accommodate real-world access events of medical data;
3. we will design and develop a prototype system using open-source Hyperledger Fabric blockchain to implement two or three typical use cases in medical data application, where the home-nursing patients can generate and upload their clinical data to hospital’s medical database, and third-party medical researchers can fetch medical data to conduct computing and analysis according to their predefined privilege.

Project Team

• Dr. Yan Luo, PI, University of Massachusetts Lowell

• Dr. Yu Cao, Co-PI, University of Massachusetts Lowell

• Dr. Jomol Mathew, Co-PI, University of Wisconsin, School of Medicine and Public Health

• Dr. Peilong Li, Co-PI, Elizabethtown College

• Dr. Silvia Corvera, Co-PI, University of Massachusetts Medical School

Major Activities

• We have a series of research seminars within the UMass Lowell team, held biweekly project meetings among UMass Lowell researchers (Drs Y. Luo, Hao Jin, and PhD student Shan Wang), Elizabethtown College collaborator Dr. Peilong Li, and University of Wisconsin Madison (UW) collaborator Dr. Jomol Mathew in the past year.

• Postdoctoral researcher Dr. Hao Jin did an extensive survey on secure and privacy-preserving sharing of medical data, including cloud-based approaches and blockchain-based approaches. He has written three papers (one publicshed, two in submission) that focus on combining cryptography with blockchain to address the problem of secure integration and sharing of medical data.

• Since March 2020, we have been holding a series of biweekly project meetings (began from) with UW collaborator Dr. Jomol Mathew and UW IT staff (Honest Broker Thomas Callaci, Senior Systems Administrator Zekai Otles, and IT supervisor James Wong), and Elizabethtown College collaborator Dr. Peilong Li on how to implement a prototype system on medical data sharing and management via Hyperledger Fabric.

  1. Through the first project meeting in Oct of 2018 (attendees: Drs. Yan Luo and Hao Jin from UMass Lowell, Dr. Jomol Mathew from UMMS, and Dr. Peilong Li from Elizabethtown College had a discussion on the focus in the 2nd year of the project, which has been on blockchain based medical data sharing framework, algorithms and implementation. PhD student Chen Xu has implemented the proposed framework using Ethereum and this work became an integral part of his PhD dissertation.

  2. The 2nd project meeting held in summer of 2019 (attendees: Drs. Yan Luo, Hao Jin and PhD student Chen Xu from UMass Lowell and Dr. Peilong Li from Elizabethtown College). The focus of this project meeting was how to integrate software defined network (SDN) into medical data sharing and management and enable fine-grained data access control with privacy protection. The outcome from the meeting was an idea of adopting multi-authority attribute-based encryption (MA-ABE) and SDN-based connectivity control to provide secure medical information integration and sharing, with blockchain and smart contract working as a workflow network to integrate geo-scattered medical databases residing in private hospital networks.

Outcomes

During the past 3 year, we have several papers published on journals and conferences.

• Hao Jin, Chen Xu, Yan Luo, Peilong Li. “Blockchain-Based Secure and Privacy-Preserving Clinical Data Sharing and Integration.” ICA3PP 2020.
• Hao Jin, Chen Xu, Yan Luo, Peilong Li, Yu Cao and Jomol Mathew. “Toward Secure, Privacy-Preserving, and Interoperable Medical Data Sharing via Blockchain.” ICPADS 2019.
• Hao Jin, Yan Luo, Peilong Li, and Mathew Jomol. “A Review of Secure and Privacy-Preserving Medical Data Sharing.” IEEE Access, 7, 61656-61669.
• Luo, Yan, Hao Jin, and Peilong Li. “A Blockchain Future for Secure Clinical Data Sharing: A Position Paper.” Proceedings of the ACM International Workshop on Security in Software Defined Networks & Network Function Virtualization. ACM, 2019.
• Peilong Li, Chen Xu, Hao Jin, Chunyang Hu, Yan Luo, Yu Cao, Jomol Mathew, Yunsheng Ma. “ChainSDI: A Software-Defined Infrastructure for Regulation-Compliant Home-Based Healthcare Services Secured by Blockchains.” IEEE Systems Journal. PP. 1-12. 10.1109/JSYST.2019.2937930.

Currently, we are developing a prototype system to implement blockchain-based medical data management in collaboration with University of Wisconsin Madison and Elizabethtown College. The prototype is based on the open-source blockchain project Hyperledger Fabric 2.0, which is a permissioned blockchain with modular consensus and high throughput. We plan to integrate our prototype with REDCap, which is a secure medical data management system used by 4000+ medical institutions.

Training and Development

Participants at UMass Lowell

The following doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers have been supported by this NSF grant from 2017-2020:

• PhD Students: Chen Xu
• Postdoctoral researchers: Dr. Peilong Li, Dr. Hao Jin

Outreach Activities

• The project provided training and professional development opportunities to students and postdocs through conferences such as ACM SDN-NFV workshop and ICPADS 2019. The former postdoc researcher Dr. Peilong Li attended the conference and presented our papers and interacted with leading developers and researchers.

Sponsor

CICI-SECTOR project is funded by the National Science Foundation of USA under Award No. 1738965.