CIA & ICE: A Case for Paper in a World of Digital Health

With the third annual USENIX Workshop on Health Security and Privacy just a few weeks away, now seems like a good time to push out a copy of one position paper that didn't make the cut for the conference.

After leveraging my Microsoft and UW sway to get on the first-ever HealthSec program a couple years ago (peep the paper & rushed video here), my unaffiliated hobbyist paper didn't make it on the docket this time around. Granted, only 15 of 29 papers were accepted for the conference - all 15 of which come from academia, and certainly involved more than just a few weeknights' worth of work. I may have had a better outcome if I had done a better job identifying my audience (should I have done without the security primers?), and had been much more clear about my main point (simply put: I think many digital solutions to the emergency-access problem are wildly overcomplicated and prone to failure).

I'm not too bummed about not getting selected, but I do hate spending time on things without giving the results some avenue to be freed. So, maybe I'll try to sneak this into the Rump Sessions, or maybe just throw it out here on the ol' blog.

Abstract: As electronic healthcare systems and personal medical devices evolve, security researchers continually discover new ways to protect (and compromise) private health information. This position paper and short presentation will urge the technical health-security community to consider supplementing electronic health records with the very construct that many of these systems originally aimed to replace: paper.

Treat yourself to the full two pages here:
http://dl.jimio.com/healthsec/oleary_healthsec_2012.pdf

Paarthurnax, Spittin' the Truth

Who would have thought that a make-believe dragon in a video game would provide the spark needed to get another blog post up here? This past Christmas, Magoo gifted me a previously-played, parentally-stepped-on copy of Skyrim. I was a bit of an Oblivion addict back in the Summer of 2006, and Tom had lost interest in this latest Elder Scrolls installment somewhere around the tenth glitch and probably 20th hour of aimless horse riding. I haven't had a chance to really really dive into it yet, only chipping away an hour or two about every other weekend; though, I recently came across the sort of scene that makes this slow-paced, drawn-out game so enjoyable. About 13 minutes deep into this clip of ~17 minutes containing nothing but dialogue, the leader of the Greybeards drops some real knowledge:

Everything mortal fades away in time, but the spirit remains. Ponder the meaning of spirit. Where mortal flesh may wither and die, the spirit endures.

By pretty much all metrics, 2011 was the best and busiest year of my life. As such, I never really had a chance to stop and smell the roses, nevermind stop and type the proses. What better way to capture not only the memories, but the spirit of all this awesomeness than to do so in a digital format that'll almost certainly outlive me. Some day, I'll look back and be glad that I took a few minutes to churn out a post that'll last a lifetime.

Now, for the real shocker: turns out the guy that did this dragon voice was the same guy behind "It's-a-Me, Mario!!". Talk about versatility.

"A More Beautiful Web"

My GMail inbox in IE9:



</snark>

"Future Ambitions"

With just a few weeks left before I finish my MS in CS from UW, I'm sitting here plowing through ElGamal threshold encryption schemes and more moduli than you can shake a stick at. Even though my eyes want to fall out on account of all these summations and exponentiated variables, I can't help but think how happy my highschool self would be right now:

5 Year Blogiversary

Whoa! Just like that, five years of sparse, poorly-written blog entries are officially in the books! To celebrate, you’d think I might go back and finish off one of the 29 posts that are currently sitting in some state of draft half-assery, or that I might even kick off the series of post-per-day entries chronicling February’s trip to Kenya. Nope! Instead, let’s get a little chuckle out of the top referring keywords that bring people to this wondrous little piece of the web:



I’ve dedicated posts to this before, but let me say it again: Blogger is awesome. They’ve added a “stats” tab to the main dashboard, which gives you all sorts of interesting information on what people are looking at on your blog, how they’re getting here, and where they come from. The first keyword makes the most sense sense, the second was shorthand for my Security Tips for HealthVault Application Developers document (an acronym I included in a few public presentations), and the fourth can thankfully be explained away by this fun little Google Scraper. By far, the most popular post has been the one on this weird program that I put together to inject words into other words to see if they make new words. Uh, either people are very disappointed when they see what GeneSplicer.exe actually does (sorry, scientists) or I’m not so alone in my hobbyist linguistic pursuits :)

RIP, Grandma O

Grandma O passed away in late August, after gradually going downhill on account of mesothelioma for the past year or so. I headed back to MA for the funeral and wake in early September, and had a chance to scan a couple pictures when I returned a couple weeks later for a previously-planned trip to Andover for work. I couldn’t dig up one of my favorite pics (baby Jimmy eating an enormous amount of strawberries in my grandparents’ kitchen), but did want to throw some of my favorite memories up here for posterity’s sake. Without question, the suckiest part of living in WA is the long distance away from the rest of my family, as I hadn’t seen Grandma since I was back for Jared’s wedding in June. She was definitely not feeling too good then, but didn’t let that change her personality one bit; we sat and talked for a couple hours, and I really couldn’t have asked for a better visit.

In no particular order, a few memories (which may only make sense to me): Thanksgivings at Grandma’s with her picture-perfect apple pies, her sense of humor and laugh (thankfully, one of the older guys at work laughs in a very similar way; always makes me smile when I hear it), all sorts of board and card games (Candy Land with little Magoo, the Scattergories honeymoon question, and lots of Go Fish as kids), never revealing her age until she was 83 (and even then being so hush-hush about it that she refused to tell a police officer in Canada), her becoming the biggest and most informed Patriots fan I’ve ever known, calling me out after drinking 2 Sam Adams Cherry Wheats at Ted’s graduation party, giving slight variations of the same sweaters to me/Ted, Justin/Tom, John/Dad for Christmas, and countless times babysitting the O’Leary kids.

RIP, Grandma O; you’re loved and missed.

The Impact of Malice in ICTDW

Well, I said that I would take it easy on the nerd posts after that last one; but, in a way, it’s so much easier to write a few words around a ton of work you’ve already done than to try and capture everything you want to say about a particular experience in blog format (especially when Facebook makes uploading/captioning your pictures so easy!). I’m hoping to give the ol’ jimio.com a little overhaul sometime soon, and want to update the “projects” section with something more than just “coming soon”. This will likely make the cut, so I'm tossing it up here now. I put this 11-page jewel together for a class back in January, and have been sitting on it ever since. There isn’t really much cutting-edge security work here, but a call to action for people working in the developing-world field to step back and think about security:

Abstract
“Information and Communication Technology for the Developing World” (ICTDW) is an emerging field that hopes to empower the world’s poor through technical innovations. In doing so, it is possible that the solutions deployed to assist developing communities could actually be introducing novel and avoidable risk to the lives of the intended users. This paper urges developers to consider the assets and threats in a system, and to weigh the benefits of security enhancements against the implicit costs associated with them. After outlining different motivators for attack, threats to several ICTDW projects are discussed: a homegrown irrigation system, the PRODEM ATM deployment, and the One Laptop per Child program. In order for ICTDW to be successful and for users to be protected, security must be considered during development.

Check out the full paper here:
http://dl.jimio.com/jimoleary_malice_in_ictdw.pdf

(this is almost a step in the direction of getting a post together on my Kenya trip! :P)