A Flexible Role-based Secure Messaging Service: Exploiting IBE Technology in a Health Care Trial

IBE, secure messaging, RBAC, access control, health care, security, privacy The management of confidential and sensitive information is a major problem for people and organisations. Dynamic organisations require secure solutions to protect confidential documents against unauthorised access and to cope with changes to people's roles and permissions. Solutions based on traditional cryptographic systems and PKI show their limitations, in terms of flexibility and manageability. This paper describes an innovative technical solution in the area of role-based secure messaging that exploits Identifier-based Encryption (IBE) technology. It illustrates the advantages over a similar approach based on traditional cryptography and PKI. It discusses a few open issues. A secure messaging system based on our technology has been fully implemented and it is currently used in a trial with a major European health service organization.