Secure data sharing and processing in heterogeneous clouds

The extensive cloud adoption among the European Public Sector Players empowered them to own and operate a range of cloud infrastructures. These deployments vary both in the size and capabilities, as well as in the range of employed technologies and processes. The public sector, however, lacks the necessary technology to enable effective, interoperable and secure integration of a multitude of its computing clouds and services. In this work we focus on the federation of private clouds and the approaches that enable secure data sharing and processing among the collaborating infrastructures and services of public entities. We investigate the aspects of access control, data and security policy languages, as well as cryptographic approaches that enable fine-grained security and data processing in semi-trusted environments. We identify the main challenges and frame the future work that serve as an enabler of interoperability among heterogeneous infrastructures and services. Our goal is to enable both security and legal conformance as well as to facilitate transparency, privacy and effectivity of private cloud federations for the public sector needs. © 2015 The Authors

Privacy Architectures: Reasoning About Data Minimisation and Integrity

Privacy by design will become a legal obligation in the European Community if the Data Protection Regulation eventually gets adopted. However, taking into account privacy requirements in the design of a system is a challenging task. We propose an approach based on the specification of privacy architectures and focus on a key aspect of privacy, data minimisation, and its tension with integrity requirements. We illustrate our formal framework through a smart metering case study.Comment: appears in STM - 10th International Workshop on Security and Trust Management 8743 (2014

Semantic-based policy engineering for autonomic systems

This paper presents some important directions in the use of ontology-based semantics in achieving the vision of Autonomic Communications. We examine the requirements of Autonomic Communication with a focus on the demanding needs of ubiquitous computing environments, with an emphasis on the requirements shared with Autonomic Computing. We observe that ontologies provide a strong mechanism for addressing the heterogeneity in user task requirements, managed resources, services and context. We then present two complimentary approaches that exploit ontology-based knowledge in support of autonomic communications: service-oriented models for policy engineering and dynamic semantic queries using content-based networks. The paper concludes with a discussion of the major research challenges such approaches raise

A Logical Method for Policy Enforcement over Evolving Audit Logs

We present an iterative algorithm for enforcing policies represented in a first-order logic, which can, in particular, express all transmission-related clauses in the HIPAA Privacy Rule. The logic has three features that raise challenges for enforcement --- uninterpreted predicates (used to model subjective concepts in privacy policies), real-time temporal properties, and quantification over infinite domains (such as the set of messages containing personal information). The algorithm operates over audit logs that are inherently incomplete and evolve over time. In each iteration, the algorithm provably checks as much of the policy as possible over the current log and outputs a residual policy that can only be checked when the log is extended with additional information. We prove correctness and termination properties of the algorithm. While these results are developed in a general form, accounting for many different sources of incompleteness in audit logs, we also prove that for the special case of logs that maintain a complete record of all relevant actions, the algorithm effectively enforces all safety and co-safety properties. The algorithm can significantly help automate enforcement of policies derived from the HIPAA Privacy Rule.Comment: Carnegie Mellon University CyLab Technical Report. 51 page

Towards a computer-interpretable actionable formal model to encode data governance rules

With the needs of science and business, data sharing and re-use has become an intensive activity for various areas. In many cases, governance imposes rules concerning data use, but there is no existing computational technique to help data-users comply with such rules. We argue that intelligent systems can be used to improve the situation, by recording provenance records during processing, encoding the rules and performing reasoning. We present our initial work, designing formal models for data rules and flow rules and the reasoning system, as the first step towards helping data providers and data users sustain productive relationships.Comment: The non-draft version of this paper has been submitted and accepted to BC2DC 19 (at IEEE eScience 2019

Service-oriented coordination platform for technology-enhanced learning

It is currently difficult to coordinate learning processes, not only because multiple stakeholders are involved (such as students, teachers, administrative staff, technical staff), but also because these processes are driven by sophisticated rules (such as rules on how to provide learning material, rules on how to assess students’ progress, rules on how to share educational responsibilities). This is one of the reasons for the slow progress in technology-enhanced learning. Consequently, there is a clear demand for technological facilitation of the coordination of learning processes. In this work, we suggest some solution directions that are based on SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture). In particular, we propose a coordination service pattern consistent with SOA and based on requirements that follow from an analysis of both learning processes and potentially useful support technologies. We present the service pattern considering both functional and non-functional issues, and we address policy enforcement as well. Finally, we complement our proposed architecture-level solution directions with an example. The example illustrates our ideas and is also used to identify: (i) a short list of educational IT services; (ii) related non-functional concerns; they will be considered in future work

Setting Standards for Fair Information Practice in the U.S. Private Sector

The confluence of plans for an Information Superhighway, actual industry self-regulatory practices, and international pressure dictate renewed consideration of standard setting for fair information practices in the U.S. private sector. The legal rules, industry norms, and business practices that regulate the treatment of personal information in the United States are organized in a wide and dispersed manner. This Article analyzes how these standards are established in the U.S. private sector. Part I argues that the U.S. standards derive from the influence of American political philosophy on legal rule making and a preference for dispersed sources of information standards. Part II examines the aggregation of legal rules, industry norms, and business practice from these various decentralized sources. Part III ties the deficiencies back to the underlying U.S. philosophy and argues that the adherence to targeted standards has frustrated the very purposes of the narrow, ad hoc regulatory approach to setting private sector standards. Part IV addresses the irony that European pressure should force the United States to revisit the setting of standards for the private sector