Information Security Symposium

Overview

I recently spoke at the Davis Security Symposium with my friend Harrison Nguyen about healthcare and blockchain.

The gist of the paper is:

1. Health information exchange is important and complicated.
2. Despite millions being invested into blockchain + healthcare solutions, blockchain remains a premature technology.
3. At its core, blockchain allows us to act without a trusted 3rd party. For healthcare, this means blockchain would manage our permissions for who can access health records (infeasible to actually store the images).
4. Who would run these nodes? The hospital? 3rd parties? Other patients? If so, can we guarantee that at least 50% would be honest? No.
5. Most benefits of blockchain are really just of PKI.

Personally, I also realized that many people still don’t understand how blockchain works even though there’s many resources talking about how it fundamentally works. It’s difficult to discuss further implications of this technology with people don’t have a strong understanding of its capabilities yet.

There’s also quite a significant split between people who are in IT security and research security.