Privacy-Aware Routing for Sharing Sensitive Information across Wide-Area Networks

Nowadays, we are witnessing the increasing demand of exchanging sensitive data across national boundaries. Healthcare is representative of this tendency, with healthcare-related data being transferred among countries so as to support international patient mobility. Despite in the recent years a lot of efforts have been devoted to deal with such an issue, healthcare-related data exchange across different countries is still an open issue. Technological problems have been partially resolved thanks to the recent research and standardized profiles for Health Information Systems, but privacy implications and issues have considerably limited the possibility of healthcare-related data exchange. The main reason is that such data should not travel across countries with a lower data privacy guarantees than the one where the data have been originated. To treat such a problem, this paper describes a solution for privacy-aware routing, where the selection of the optimal path towards a destination does not only depends on the minimization of the latency and other quality-of-service properties, but also on the offered data privacy assurances due to the applied legal frameworks in the traversed countries. To this aim we make use of linguistic fuzzy sets for modeling the data privacy needs and offers, and game theory for resolving the routing problem in a distributed manner. A preliminary set of simulations have been described, which prove the quality of the proposed solution.