PSecurity Specification Language for Distributed Health Information System (DiHIS)

The introduction of policy based management which to manage distributed,
complex and numerous systems is widely accepted and used in various sectors. The
policy creators create policies that suit best for their operations and management. Since
there are numerous of policies, this research focuses on the security policies only which
are appointed to the distributed system of health information system. In order to
implement the security policies, we need a language that can represent the security
policies for distributed health information system completely. From the literature review
conducted, there are numerous of security languages have been introduced since two
decades ago. Those languages carry their own approaches representing the security policy
and some of them do not support the characteristics of distributed system. There is no
security language to implement the security policy for distributed health information
system. This thesis introduces and initiates a security language to implement security
policies in distributed health information system called DiHIS. Adding to that, there are
three existing security languages used for discussion and comparison with the proposed
DiHIS security language. They are ASL, LaSCO and Ponder. DiHIS security language
has shown that it is able to represent the Security Policy Model for Clinical Information
System completely compares to those three security languages. This language also has an
added value when it covers the Need To Know Policy which other security languages do
not. Need To Know Policy is one of the crucial issues in the health sector. DiHIS security
language has also been tested with the application domain in health information system.
The strength of the language can be seen with the ability of DiHIS to represent the
security policies in various connections between various organizations involved in
distributed health information system.