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Cross-Border Threat Screening and Supply Chain Defense

A Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence

Development of a Verifiable, Privacy-Controlled Medical Information Exchange Network –System Concept and Testbed

Issue:

Source assured biomedical data (BMD) distribution is critical to medicine, public health, and biological threat research.  Researchers need to have high confidence that the digital assets in hand are produced by vetted principals, and that the chains of data recombination and alteration, both intentional and unintentional, are traceable. The data owner should be assured of indisputable ownership amidst a very complex data distribution process, with confidence that principles found to violate the access protocol can be banned from further access to the digital asset(s) in question.

Objectives:

  1. Support verifiable, privacy-protected information inquiry and response between subjects
  2. Support management of identifiers of subjects and their cryptographic credentials to engage in an information exchange
  3. Demonstrate secure third party co-computing that allows two untrusting parties to securely share select data and execute defined computations on this data, without releasing the data to the other party
  4. Demonstrate graph-based forward and backward data traceability with additive ownership attribution/provenance
Technical Illustration from Texas A&M University – College of Engineering - Computer Science

Value Proposition:

This project gives government and other personnel involved in critical situational management a means to flow and aggregate important information and data with a high degree of verifiability and traceability with respect to changes from original form. The first applications being explored are medical in nature, but overall the system can serve like purposes in many domains. Additionally, the third party co-computing function allows untrusting parties to collaborate in a controlled and secure fashion without outright exposure of critical data or organizational exposure. Components of this work have been considered for incorporation into field-deployed incident, information management functions.

Project Lead Texas A&M University – College of Engineering – Computer Science
Research TeamPI: Steve Liu, Ph.D., TAMU Computer Science and Engineering Co-PI: Matt Cochran, DVM, CBTS
Budget$752,622
DurationApril 2023 – April 2025