Stealth Project

Social Trust-Based Health Information Dissemination Control

General Information

The rise of Internet usage has led to the increasing availability of online services. Many of the ones, due to their interactivity characteristics, have required the creation and maintenance of dynamically established local or global network infrastructures to ensure their operation. However, the typical characteristics of dynamic environments, such as the lack of network infrastructure and device mobility, making it difficult to control the data dissemination on a range of applications domains. Recently, the demand for health services in networks, known as e-health, has been highlighted, given their importance in people’s lives. Due to the nature of the provided services, e-health handles sensitive and critical personal data; thus, security must be preserved on delivery and from unauthorized access.

This project aims to provide a secure and robust dissemination of sensitive personal data in dynamic and no structured environments to support the decision making process in the face of health emergencies. In these environments, this data dissemination must observe the context and the urgency of the information involved, since its availability is essential to proper attendance. The lack of infrastructure, including communication networks, which often happens in these locations, inhibits and becomes a barrier to data delivery. Furthermore, occasional interactions among people turn almost unfeasible to rely on them, mainly on the past ones, because they are occasionally unknown (i.e., Zero-Knowledge condition). These conditions make it challenging to verify devices' trust, and prevent to control data dissemination.

In the face of these challenges, we have designed a solution to ensure safe dissemination of sensitive data in dynamic and unstructured environments, to support decision making in the face of emergency health situations. This solution is named STEALTH (Social Trust-Based HEALTH Information Dissemination Control), it works in IoT and disregards the past interactions of the devices. STEALTH employs the concepts of social trust and communities of interest. In this way, social trust establishes the similarity of interests of the device's owners, allows the formation of communities of interest, and guarantees the availability of the service. Through people's competence attribute, social trust enables STEALTH naturally to guarantee the reliability of the service. Over time, the owner's devices recreate their communities, taking into account the changes in their neighborhoods. In a health emergency appearing, the device disseminates user sensitive data to a recommended device, which belongs to its community and possesses higher trust. Thus, this node can make some decisions.

The performance evaluation of STEALTH aimed to verify its availability and reliability in the dissemination of people's sensitive data in an emergency. We employ simulations to evaluate STEALTH using the NS-3 simulator, and we have considered a realistic mobility model that mimics human behavior and devices with social aspects. Results demonstrate that it ensures data dissemination to people who can contribute toward an efficient service. STEALTH has achieved up to 97.14% of reliability in accessing sensitive data with a maximum latency of 170ms, and up to 100% of availability during emergencies.

Accomplishments

Investigation of existing social trust techniques employed in dynamics and non structured environments
Investigation of dissemination control mechanisms applied in dynamics and non structured environments
Investigation of social aspects from people and their relationships to control data dissemination
Definition of characteristics, possibilities of use and contributions of social trust techniques, data dissemination control mechanisms and social aspects of people to a solution
Design of a dissemination control scheme that groups nodes in communities based in social aspects of devices owners and evaluate their trust, which disregard nodes past interactions
Evaluation of the data dissemination control in urban scenarios with lack of structure and through dynamics networks
Analysis of the neighborhood in order to establish communities of interests and control personal sensitive data dissemination

Publications

M.Sc. Dissertation

Disseminação Segura de Dados Pessoais Vitais para Apoio às Tomadas de Decisão em Situações Emergenciais. Agnaldo de Souza Batista. Master's thesis, Federal University of Parana, Curitiba, Brazil, 2019.

Bachelor's Monographs

Gestão de Múltiplos Eventos Críticos Suportados por Redes Dinâmicas no contexto da SIoT. Giovanni Rosa da Silva. Bachelor's monograph, Federal University of Parana, Curitiba, Brazil, 2020.

International Publications

E-Health Sensitive Data Dissemination Exploiting Trust and Mobility of Users. Agnaldo S. Batista, Michele Nogueira, Aldri L. dos Santos. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.07296, 2020. [Pdf] [BibTex]

Papers on national conferences

Disseminação Robusta de Dados Pessoais Sensíveis Baseada em Comunidade de Interesse e Confiança Social para Suportar Situações Emergenciais de Saúde. Agnaldo S. Batista, Aldri L. dos Santos, Michele Nogueira. In: XIX Simpósio Brasileiro em Segurança da Informação e de Sistemas Computacionais (SBSeg), Porto Alegre, 2019. [Pdf] [BibTex]

Coordenação de Múltiplos Eventos Críticos de Saúde Por Redes Dinâmicas de Interesses Sociais. Agnaldo S. Batista, Giovanni R. da Silva, Aldri L. dos Santos, Michele Nogueira. In: XXXVIII Simpósio Brasileiro de Redes de Computadores e Sistemas Distribuídos (SBRC), Porto Alegre, 2020. [Pdf] [BibTex]

Disseminação Segura de Dados Pessoais Vitais para Apoio às Tomadas de Decisão em Situações Emergenciais. Agnaldo S. Batista, Aldri L. dos Santos. In: 20º Simpósio Brasileiro de Computação Aplicada à Saúde - Concurso de Teses e Dissertações (SBCAS), Porto Alegre, 2020. [Pdf] [BibTex]

Team

Agnaldo de Souza Batista [Page] [Mail]
Aldri Luiz dos Santos [Page] [Mail] (Principal Investigator)
Michele Nogueira [Page] [Mail]
Giovanni da Silva [Page] [Mail]
Lucas B. Cunha [Page] [Mail]

Prototype

Main characteristics

Android operating system - version 7.0
Bluetooth - version 4.0

Codes

Distribution of the software

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.. Agnaldo de Souza Batista. Master's thesis, Federal University of Parana, Curitiba, Brazil, 2019.
This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

Release notes

This package contains all modifications that were added to NS-3 in order for the system to work. It has been tested under the version 3.28.

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Award

Honorable Mention Award, Concurso de Teses e Dissertações (CTD), Simpósio Brasileiro de Computação Aplicada à Saúde (SBCAS), “Disseminação Segura de Dados Pessoais Vitais para Apoio às Tomadas de Decisão em Situações Emergenciais”, Agnaldo S. Batista, Aldri L. dos Santos, 2020. [Video]

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the CNPq Universal project, grant \#436649/2018-7.

Citing us

We encourage you to cite our project if you have used them in your work. You can use the following BibTeX citation:

@misc{stealth,
  author       = {Agnaldo Batista, and Aldri Santos},
  title        = {Stealth Project},
  howpublished = {\url{http://stealh.dcc.ufmg.br}},
  month        = aug,
  year         = 2019}