Security middleware infrastructure for medical imaging system integration and monitoring

With the increasing demand for electronic medical records sharing, it is a challenge for medical imaging service providers to protect the patient privacy and IT infrastructure security in an integrated environment. In this paper, we present a novel security middleware infrastructure for seamlessly and securely linking legacy medical imaging systems, diagnostic imaging web applications as well as mobile applications. In this infrastructure, software agents such as user agent and security agent have been integrated into medical imaging domains that can be trained to perform their tasks. The proposed security middleware utilizes both online security technologies such as authentication, authorization and accounting, as well as post security operations to discover system security vulnerability. By integrating with the proposed security middleware, both legacy system users and Internet users can be uniformly identified and authenticated; access to patient diagnostic images can be controlled based on patient's consent directives and other access control polices defined at a central point; relevant user access activities can be audited at a central repository; user access behavior patterns are studied by utilizing data mining techniques; the explored behavior patterns provide system administrators valuable knowledge to refine existing security policies; behavior-based access control is enforced by capturing user's dynamic behavior and determining their access rights through comparing with the discovered knowledge of common behaviors. A case study is presented based on the proposed infrastructure.