Developing a Security Protocol for a Distributed Decision Support System in a Healthcare Environment

In this paper, we describe the unique security issues involved in healthcare domains. These have been addressed to the needs of the HealthAgents project. In the proposed approach, several levels of security have been provided in accordance with Software Engineering principles, ethical regulations for healthcare data, as well as the security requirements usually raised from the distributed clinical settings. The result is the production of a secure and maintainable Multi-Agent System that enables secure communication, uniform home site authentication, and customised resource access authorisation. A security policy rule scheme has been designed for agent interaction modelling. This separates the functional and non-functional (security) requirements but let security policy constraints integrate into the running of the agents via a unified role notion. Each user/agent can play a function role only when its assigned social rights roles permit the access to resources of various types and geographical locations, as specified in the function role behaviour. The approach is illustrated using a comprehensive secure access case.