Secure Data Warehousing

From FreemedDeveloperWiki, the FreeMED developers' Wiki.

Secure Data Warehousing is a concept introduced into FreeMED for the 0.8.1 release. It allows medical data to be warehoused at a third party location without giving that third party any access to the data. This is due to the medical data being encrypted using GnuPG (an open variant of the ubiquitous PGP).

Contents 1 Architecture Overview 2 Software Implementation 3 Retrieval 3.1 Storage 3.2 Retrieval

Architecture Overview

Software Implementation

The WebDAV transport is implemented in C using the neon library; it is available in the freemed-utilities Subversion tree under archive_client.

One of the Data warehousing aspects we have not spoken much of is retrieval

Retrieval

Storage

Propose three redundancies for storage

• Local at FreeMED hqtrs
• Distant at data repository
• Out of country (?India)

Servers be high order RAID or similar scheme compliant. Data storage be encrypted

Retrieval

• Must be by secure verifiable code
  • Biometric USB key might fill the bill
  • May wish to have several levels within a practice
• Level 1 retrieval
  • Back up for ordinary crash or data disturbance.
  • Could be done by key owner or for verification.
• Level 2 restoral
  • Done when there is a catastrophic data loss
  • Can re-establish an entire system
• Must make the data fireproof
  • If someone indavertently downloads a file they get garbage
  • Breakins do not have a key at the storage point.
  • Need to be compliant with data retrieval for Legal purposes (see new article in Eweek 3/14/07)

TODO: Flesh out documentation