The Health sector’s increasing dependence on digital information and communication infrastructures renders it vulnerable to threats to privacy and cybersecurity, especially as the theft of health data has become particularly lucrative for cyber criminals. At the same time, a breach of integrity of health data can have dramatic consequences for the patients affected. CUREX addresses comprehensively the protection of the confidentiality and integrity of health data by producing a novel, flexible and scalable situational awareness-oriented platform. It allows a healthcare provider to assess the realistic cybersecurity and privacy risks they are exposed to and suggest mathematically optimal strategies for addressing these risks with safeguards tailored specifically for each business case and application. CUREX is fully GDPR compliant by design. At its core, a decentralised architecture enhanced with a private blockchain infrastructure ensures the integrity of the risk assessment process and of all data transactions that occur between the diverse range of stakeholders involved. Crucially, CUREX expands beyond technical measures and places emphasis also on improving cyber hygiene through training and raising awareness activities for a healthcare institution’s personnel. Its validation focuses on the highly challenging condition of (cross-border) health data exchange, spanning patient cross-border mobility, remote healthcare, and data exchange for research. CUREX consortium will also utilise the outcomes of the well-known MyHealthMyData project in a dedicated demonstration that will use their blockchain-enabled platform which will control the actual data exchange. We envisage that CUREX will impact the European market developing one of the first blockchain platform for risk assessment management under the GDPR.

Budget: €4,987,825 (University of Greenwich share €311,097, University of Surrey €39,478).
Principal Investigator: Manos Panaousis.
Partners: Can be found here.
Acceptance Rate: 6/46.
Role: Leading research in optimisation of cyber controls and lead the development of the Optimal Safeguards Tool (OST) for a healthcare cybersecurity use case (Work Package leader: Risk Management for Health Data Exchange).