Towards improved security criteria for certification of electronic health record systems

Authors:
Andrew Austin;Ben Smith;Laurie Williams
Affiliations:
North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC;North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2010 ICSE Workshop on Software Engineering in Health Care
Year:
2010

Citing 6
Cited 1

A framework for the measurement of software quality

Proceedings of the software quality assurance workshop on Functional and performance issues
Threat Modeling

Threat Modeling
Eliciting security requirements with misuse cases

Requirements Engineering
Software Penetration Testing

IEEE Security and Privacy
Software Security: Building Security In

Software Security: Building Security In
Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs

IEEE Software

Challenges for protecting the privacy of health information: required certification can leave common vulnerabilities undetected

Proceedings of the second annual workshop on Security and privacy in medical and home-care systems

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) is an electronic health record certification organization in the United States. In 2009, CCHIT's comprehensive criteria were augmented with security criteria that define additional functional security requirements. The goal of this research is to illustrate the importance of requiring misuse cases in certification standards, such as CCHIT, by demonstrating the implementation bugs in an open source healthcare IT application. We performed an initial evaluation of an open source electronic health record system, OpenEMR, using an automated static analysis tool and a penetration testing tool. We were able to discover implementation bugs latent in the application, ranging from cross-site scripting to insecure cryptographic algorithms. Our findings stress the importance that certification security criteria should focus on implementation bugs as well as design flaws. Based upon our findings, we recommend that CCHIT be augmented with a set of misuse cases that check for specific threats against EMR systems and thereby improve this aspect of the certification process.