Bill Buchanan - A Vision for the NHS: A Citizen Wallet
Release Date: 08/15/2023
World-leaders in Cryptography: Leslie Lamport
ASecuritySite Podcast
Please excuse the poor quality of my microphone, as the wrong microphone was selected. In research, we are all just building on the shoulders of true giants, and there are few larger giants than Leslie Lamport — the creator of LaTeX. For me, every time I open up a LaTeX document, I think of the work he did on creating LaTeX, and which makes my research work so much more productive. If I was still stuck with Microsoft Office for research, I would spend half of my time in that horrible equation editor, or in trying to integrate the references into the required format, or in...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Daniel J Bernstein
ASecuritySite Podcast
Daniel J Bernstein (djb) was born in 1971. He is a USA/German citizen and a Personal Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology and a Research Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. At the tender age of 24 — in 1995 — he, along with the Electronic Frontier Foundation — brought a case against the US Government related to the protection of free speech (Bernstein v. United States: ). It resulted in a ruling that software should be included in the First Amendment. A core contribution is that it has reduced government regulations around cryptography. It was a sign of the...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Jan Camenisch
ASecuritySite Podcast
Jan is the CTO and a Cryptographer at DFINITY, and, since 1998, he has consistently produced research outputs of rigour, novelty and sheer brilliance [here]. He was recently awarded the Levchin Prize at Real World Crypto 2024 - along with Anna Lysyanskaya. Jan’s research core happened when he was hosted in the IBM Zurich Research Lab, but has since moved to DFINITY, and is still producing research outputs that are some of the best in the whole of the computer science research area. He has published over 140 widely cited papers and has been granted around 140 patents. Jan has also received...
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An Interview with Ted Miracco
ASecuritySite Podcast
Ted Miracco is the CEO of Approov and which is Scottish/US company that is headquartered in Edinburgh. Miracco has over 30 years of experience in cybersecurity, defence electronics, RF/microwave circuit design, semiconductors and electronic design automation (EDA). He co-founded and served as CEO of Cylynt, which focuses on intellectual property and compliance protection
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World-leaders in Cybersecurity: Troy Hunt
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Troy is a world-leading cybersecurity professional. He created and runs the Have I Been Pwned? Web site, and which contains details of the most significant data breaches on the Internet. Along with this, he has developed other security tools, such as ASafaWeb, which automated the security analysis of ASP.NET Web sites. Troy is based in Australia and has an extensive blog at
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The Greatest Step Change in Cybersecurity Ever! Welcome to the New and Scary World of Generative AI and Cybersecurity
ASecuritySite Podcast
This is Day 0 of a new world of cybersecurity. Everything changes from here. There will be a time before Generative AI (GenAI) in cybersecurity and a time after it. Over the last two years, GenAI has come on leaps and bounds, and where it once suffered from hallucinations, took racist and bigoted approaches, and often was over-assertive, within ChatGPT 4.5, we see the rise of a friendly and slightly submissive agent, and that is eager to learn from us. This LLM (Large Language Model) approach thus starts to break down the barriers between humans and computers and brings the opportunity to gain...
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Towards the Memex: All Hail The Future Rulers of our World
ASecuritySite Podcast
And, so George Orwell projected a world where every single part of our lives was monitored and controlled by Big Brother. Arthur C Clark outlined the day when machines focused solely on a goal — even if it was to the detriment of human lives. And, Isaac Asimov outlined a world where machines would have to be programmed with rules so that they could not harm a human. The Rise of the Machine With the almost exponential rise in the power of AI, we are perhaps approaching a technological singularity — a time when technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, and which can have...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Marty Hellman (March 2024)
ASecuritySite Podcast
This seminar series runs for students on the Applied Cryptography and Trust module, but invites guests from students from across the university. Martin is one of the co-creators of public key encryption, and worked alongside Whitfield Diffie in the creation of the widely used Diffie-Hellman method. In 2015, he was presented with the ACM Turing Award (the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in Computer Science) for his contribution to computer science. He is currently a professor emeritus at Stanford University. https://engineering.stanford.edu/node/9141/printable/print
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Vincent Rijmen (March 2024)
ASecuritySite Podcast
Vincent Rijmen is one of the co-creators of the NIST-defined AES standard (also known as Rijndael). He also co-designed the WHIRLPOOL hashing method, along with designing other block ciphers, such as Square and SHARK. In 2002, Vincent was included in the Top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35, and, along with Joan Daemen, was awarded the RSA Award for Excellence in Mathematics. He recently joined Cryptomathic as a chief cryptographer, and also holds a professor position (gewoon hoogleraar) at K.U.Leuven, and adjunct professorship at the University of Bergen, Norway. His paper on...
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World-leaders in Cryptography: Whitfield Diffie
ASecuritySite Podcast
Whitfield Diffie is one of the greatest Computer Scientists ever. He - along with Marty Hellman - was one of the first to propose the usage of public key encryption and co-created the Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange method. Overall, the Diffie-Hellman method is still used in virtually every Web connection on the Internet, and has changed from using discrete log methods to elliptic curve methods. In 2015, Whitfield was also awarded the ACM Turing Prize - and which is the Nobel Prize equivalent in Computer Science. In this on-line talk he meets with Edinburgh Napier University students,...
info_outlineYour organisation needs a vision. Without it, you will never be great. You will never advance. You will keep doing the same old things and without any real purpose. A vision gives you a purpose and a focus. But, it needs to have a plan which takes you there. But, without it, how can you ever plan? For any great organisation, you start with a vision.
So, what about a vision for the NHS? I appreciate that I am only a technologist, but I am also a citizen, and I care about the health and well-being of my fellow citizens. I also don’t like bureaucracy and inefficiencies — and I strive in my working life to overcome these. So, our work has generally focused on improving the citizen’s viewpoint of health care.
And, so, I am honoured to present at Digital Scotland 2023 this year, and on a topic which has been our passion for over a decade — a citizen-focused health care system:
I have attended conferences in Scotland and which talk about “citizen-focused health care”, and the audience all go away inspired and ready to build new digital worlds for citizens. But nothing happens, and then we repeat the next year again. Well, this year, I will show that a vision can be created as a reality. With digital wallets, the technology is all in place, and there are no great barriers to overcome, any more.
During the COVID-19 time, there was some hope for digital advancedment and where we saw the use of digital passports — but we have failed to build of these, and have ended up with little in the way of digital engagement between the NHS and the citizen.
So here’s the problem and my vision — and it’s quite simple.
The Problem
I have interacted with the NHS for several decades — luckily, I have never had any medical ailments, but have observed it in relation to others. I have seen some truly shocking practices in dealing with patient records -including for someone in my family have “Do not resuscitate” written on their records without any discussion with the family, and where a physical filing cabinet of patient records had to be moved by taxi from one hospital in Edinburgh to another one.
Overall, there is often great resistance to change and to the adoption of digital methods. The Connecting for Health programme — which cost over £15 billion — had to be eventually cancelled, as it delivered nothing.
Why? Well, one reason is, “Won’t this replace my existing job of writing down the details?”, “Yes, but you can do and do something even better with your time”, “But, this is what I was trained for. Anyway, I don’t trust computers, anyway!”
And, so, recently, I went to register for a GP and was handed a piece of paper and told to find a pen and write down all my details. In virtually every interaction with the NHS, I have had to do this, and perhaps, one day, I will have all my medical details stored on a digital wallet on my phone, and where the GP just scans them in. Once I filled in it, it then went into a black hole — and where I hoped that a human would eventually make sense of my scribbles.
To date, I have yet to receive any confirmation that I have been registered, and I have no on-line place to check my details. The NHS can hardly get to first base in creating a proper online world for my data. It fleetingly sends me the odd email or SMS message, but it still sits behind a high wall.
Overall, in places, it feels like there are still parts of our lives that are stuck in the 20th Century.
The Vision
Let me dream now. One day, I will register for a new GP. I will walk in, and the receptionist will ask me to register. I will press a few buttons and generate a QR code. They will scan this in, and an instant message will appear to say that I am now registered and say that all my details have been registered,
“Ah, Nice to meet you, Bill. I see it is your birthday today. Please can you check your details are okay and consent to its storage?”. “All looks good”.
“How would you like us to contact you, by email or SMS?”, “Email. Please. Here is the QR code for my email address, and you can scan it”.
When I go to see the GP, they ask me for my weight and height, and, again, I go to my wallet and generate a QR code and where the GP scans it in and says,
“That’s great. All is okay. But your BMI is a little high, and a little up from the last time we meet. I will store this in your record, and we can keep a track on it. I will email you some recommendations for your diet”.
How long for this to happen?
How long will it take for this to ever happen? Well, it’s actually not that difficult. We are part of an EU project which has developed the GLASS wallet and which puts the control back in the citizen’s hands:
So, why not come and see it live on 12 Sept in London [here]:
And in November [here]:
Conclusions
We have a dream for an improved healthcare system — and we have had this dream for over a decade. The technology is all in place — we now need to use it and put the power back into the hands of those who really matter — the citizen!