mGuard

# MGuard: A Secure mHealth Infrastructure for Real-Time Data transfer with Fine-grained Access Control over NDN

**MGuard** is an NDN-based system designed to support high-frequency mHealth data sharing with **fine-grained contextual access control** and **real-time data distribution**.  It is built on name-based access control (NAC/NAC-ABE) and PSync to enable timely access to sensitive mobile health data.

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## Purpose

MGuard addresses two core challenges in mHealth data sharing:

1. **Access to privacy-sensitive data is limited to authorized users based on well defined polcies**  

2. **Supporting real-time sharing of high-frequency sensor data**  

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## Core Components

### Producer 

The producer publishes mHealth data. 

- converts raw or derived data streams into NDN-named data objects,

- associates each object with appropriate attributes,

- stores encrypted data into the NDN repository,

- notifies subscribers when new data is available (via published manifest names).

### Controller 

The controller manages access control policies and bootstraps attribute-based access control. It has two sub components:

#### Access Manager 

- defines who can access which data streams,  

- parses and manages access control policies, 

- collaborates with the Attribute Authority to issue decryption keys (DKEYs) to validated data requesters.

#### Attribute Authority (AA)  

- validates consumer and producer identities (using the system’s trust anchor),

- issues policy-compliant decryption keys based on KP-ABE, 

- publishes public parameters required for encryption and decryption.

### Consumer 

A consumer retrieves mHealth data.

- receives notifications of new manifests (manifests contain new data names)  

- fetches the corresponding encrypted data objects from the repository,

- decrypts data based on issued keys and permitted attributes.

### Repository (Repo)

The Repo stores all published mHealth data objects, content keys, and manifests.  It allows consumers to

- retrieve data independently of the producer,  

- fetch CKs needed for decryption, and  

- access previously published (historical) data.  

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## Navigation

- **[[Architecture]]**

  - **[[Architecture_Details|Architecture Details]]**

- **[[Design_Elements|Design Elements]]**

  - **[[Naming_Scheme|Naming Scheme]]**

  - **[[Trust_Model|Trust Model]]**

  - **[[Access_Control|Access Control]]**

  - **[[NAC-ABE_Design|NAC-ABE Design]]**

  - **[[Manifest_Design|Manifest Design]]**

  - **[[PSync_Design|PSync Design]]**

  - **[[Pub-Sub API|Pub-Sub API Design]]**

  - **[[Repo|Repo Design]]**

- **[[Developer_Guide|Developer Guide]]**

- [Open editable Figma diagram](https://www.figma.com/design/I2SLqGN17XJHh8KsyAJ88l/Untitled?node-id=0-1&t=xWqhvwrDlUOlkeVU-1)