IWSEC 2017

We will have keynote talks from following world-leading researchers.

Practical Risk-based Approaches for Anonymizing Health Data: A Perspective from the Trenches

Abstract

Anonymization is fundamental for our ability to use and disclose health information for secondary purposes without the need to obtain express individual consent, such as for research, public health, drug development, and monitoring adverse drug events. Furthermore, the notion of personal information is integral to privacy statutes in many jurisdictions. Anonymization methods must provide robust assurances about privacy as well ensure that the perturbed data is still useful for secondary analysis.

Risk-based anonymization methods have been in use for more than a decade to facilitate the sharing of health information. These methods have a number of important characteristics: they are quantitative in that they allow the expression of risk values, and they take into account the context of the data use or disclosure. The implication is that security, privacy, and contractual controls need to be applied to ensure that the risk of re-identification is acceptably low.

In this presentation I will provide an overview of how risk-based anonymization methods have been applied in practice for non-public data sharing, and the specific constraints that would need to be imposed on public data sharing (e.g., open data or open government initiatives) under this model.

Biography

Dr. Khaled El Emam is a Professor at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Medicine, and a Senior Investigator at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario Research Institute. From 2005 to 2015 he held the Canada Research Chair in Electronic Health Information at the University of Ottawa. His main area of research is developing techniques for health data anonymization and secure disease surveillance for public health purposes. He is also the founder and president of Privacy Analytics Inc., which develops solutions for the de-identification of health information. In 2016 Privacy Analytics was acquired by IMS Health Inc (now QuintilesIMS).

Previously Khaled was a Senior Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada, and prior to that he was head of the Quantitative Methods Group at the Fraunhofer Institute in Kaiserslautern, Germany. In 2003 and 2004, he was ranked as the top systems and software engineering scholar worldwide by the Journal of Systems and Software based on his research on measurement and quality evaluation and improvement, and ranked second in 2002 and 2005. He holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Electronics, King’s College, at the University of London (UK).

Where did Alice and Bob go, and can blockchain help to bring them back?

Abstract

What is blockchain, and how can it help real world?

In this talk, we will see that contrary to our expectation, cryptography is mostly not used to help Alice and Bob in real world. There is usually some sort of middleman between them, and it is difficult for them to have sovereignty. Blockchain is a way to minimize the power of those middleman, if not a complete removal. In the talk, an overview of blockchain mechanism used in Bitcoin is presented. Then we will discuss some of the expected goals of the blockchain, including the usecases on self-sovereign identity.

Biography

Kazue Sako received her B.S. degree and PhD from Kyoto University. Her research interest is in cryptographic protocols that enhance privacy and fairness, e.g. electronic voting protcols, group signature schemes, digital lottery systems and blockchain architecture. In order to promote the use of anonymous authentication, she edited ISO/IEC 29191 and ISO/IEC 20008-2. She served as Program co-Chair/ Chair for ASIACRYPT 2012, 2013 and RSA conference 2016 Cryptographer's Track. She is a strong advocate of Personal Data EcoSystem, which empowers individuals with their own data. She is Senior Principal Engineer at NEC. She is also a member of the Science Council of Japan.