A purpose model and policy enforcement engine for usage control in distributed healthcare information system

This paper addresses two issues: the purpose model designed for distributed healthcare and the purpose-based usage policy enforcement engine based on our purpose-based UCON (the extended UCON model). UCON has been proposed and applied to support security requirements in different computing environments such as resources sharing in collaborative computing systems and data control in remote users or platforms, but apparently absent in its core model is "purpose", which is important for formulating a more sound privacy sensitive policy. In this paper, by observing a lack of comprehensive enforcement mechanism for purpose, we extend the UCON core model to explicitly support purpose expression and then propose a usage purpose enforcement engine, particularly for ongoing-enforcement, applied in distributed healthcare information system.