On Using Encryption Techniques to Enhance Sticky Policies Enforcement

How to enforce privacy policies to protect sensitive personal data has become an urgent research topic for security researchers, as very little has been done in this field apart from some ad hoc research efforts. The sticky policy paradigm, proposed by Karjoth, Schunter, and Waidner, provides very useful inspiration on how we can protect sensitive personal data, but the enforcement is very weak. In this paper we provide an overview of the state of the art in enforcing sticky policies, especially the concept of sticky policy enforcement using encryption techniques including Public-Key Encryption (PKE), Identity-Based Encryption (IBE), Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE), and Proxy Re-Encryption (PRE). We provide detailed comparison results on the (dis)advantages of these enforcement mechanisms. As a result of the analysis, we provide a general framework for enhancing sticky policy enforcement using Type-based PRE (TPRE), which is an extension of general PRE

Towards Data Protection Compliance

Privacy and data protection are fundamental issues nowadays for every organization. This paper calls for the development of methods, techniques and infrastructure to allow the deployment of privacy-aware IT systems, in which humans are integral part of the organizational processes and accountable for their possible misconduct. In particular, we discuss the challenges to be addressed in order to improve organizations privacy practices, as well as the approach to ensure compliance with legal requirements and increasing efficiency

Privacy-preserving Cross-domain Routing Optimization -- A Cryptographic Approach

Today's large-scale enterprise networks, data center networks, and wide area networks can be decomposed into multiple administrative or geographical domains. Domains may be owned by different administrative units or organizations. Hence protecting domain information is an important concern. Existing general-purpose Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) methods that preserves privacy for domains are extremely slow for cross-domain routing problems. In this paper we present PYCRO, a cryptographic protocol specifically designed for privacy-preserving cross-domain routing optimization in Software Defined Networking (SDN) environments. PYCRO provides two fundamental routing functions, policy-compliant shortest path computing and bandwidth allocation, while ensuring strong protection for the private information of domains. We rigorously prove the privacy guarantee of our protocol. We have implemented a prototype system that runs PYCRO on servers in a campus network. Experimental results using real ISP network topologies show that PYCRO is very efficient in computation and communication costs

Privacy Violation and Detection Using Pattern Mining Techniques

Privacy, its violations and techniques to bypass privacy violation have grabbed the centre-stage of both academia and industry in recent months. Corporations worldwide have become conscious of the implications of privacy violation and its impact on them and to other stakeholders. Moreover, nations across the world are coming out with privacy protecting legislations to prevent data privacy violations. Such legislations however expose organizations to the issues of intentional or unintentional violation of privacy data. A violation by either malicious external hackers or by internal employees can expose the organizations to costly litigations. In this paper, we propose PRIVDAM; a data mining based intelligent architecture of a Privacy Violation Detection and Monitoring system whose purpose is to detect possible privacy violations and to prevent them in the future. Experimental evaluations show that our approach is scalable and robust and that it can detect privacy violations or chances of violations quite accurately. Please contact the author for full text at [email protected]

Obligations of trust for privacy and confidentiality in distributed transactions

Purpose – This paper aims to describe a bilateral symmetric approach to authorization, privacy protection and obligation enforcement in distributed transactions. The authors introduce the concept of the obligation of trust (OoT) protocol as a privacy assurance and authorization mechanism that is built upon the XACML standard. The OoT allows two communicating parties to dynamically exchange their privacy and authorization requirements and capabilities, which the authors term a notification of obligation (NoB), as well as their commitments to fulfilling each other's requirements, which the authors term signed acceptance of obligations (SAO). The authors seek to describe some applicability of these concepts and to show how they can be integrated into distributed authorization systems for stricter privacy and confidentiality control. Design/methodology/approach – Existing access control and privacy protection systems are typically unilateral and provider-centric, in that the enterprise service provider assigns the access rights, makes the access control decisions, and determines the privacy policy. There is no negotiation between the client and the service provider about which access control or privacy policy to use. The authors adopt a symmetric, more user-centric approach to privacy protection and authorization, which treats the client and service provider as peers, in which both can stipulate their requirements and capabilities, and hence negotiate terms which are equally acceptable to both parties. Findings – The authors demonstrate how the obligation of trust protocol can be used in a number of different scenarios to improve upon the mechanisms that are currently available today. Practical implications – This approach will serve to increase trust in distributed transactions since each communicating party receives a difficult to repudiate digitally signed acceptance of obligations, in a standard language (XACML), which can be automatically enforced by their respective computing machinery. Originality/value – The paper adds to current research in trust negotiation, privacy protection and authorization by combining all three together into one set of standardized protocols. Furthermore, by providing hard to repudiate signed acceptance of obligations messages, this strengthens the legal case of the injured party should a dispute arise

Enterprise information security policy assessment - an extended framework for metrics development utilising the goal-question-metric approach

Effective enterprise information security policy management requires review and assessment activities to ensure information security policies are aligned with business goals and objectives. As security policy management involves the elements of policy development process and the security policy as output, the context for security policy assessment requires goal-based metrics for these two elements. However, the current security management assessment methods only provide checklist types of assessment that are predefined by industry best practices and do not allow for developing specific goal-based metrics. Utilizing theories drawn from literature, this paper proposes the Enterprise Information Security Policy Assessment approach that expands on the Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) approach. The proposed assessment approach is then applied in a case scenario example to illustrate a practical application. It is shown that the proposed framework addresses the requirement for developing assessment metrics and allows for the concurrent undertaking of process-based and product-based assessment. Recommendations for further research activities include the conduct of empirical research to validate the propositions and the practical application of the proposed assessment approach in case studies to provide opportunities to introduce further enhancements to the approach