Automating GDPR compliance verification for cloud-hosted services

Cloud-hosted business processes require access to customer data to complete a transaction, to improve a customer’s on-line experience or provide useful product recommendations. However, privacy concerns associated with the use of this data have led to legal regulations that impose restrictions on how such data is requested or processed by an on-line service, with large penalties for violating these restrictions, e.g. the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). We propose a framework for helping cloud-hosted services automate GDPR compliance checking. The framework comprises three steps: represent data flow in business processes with an appropriate abstraction (timed transition systems), formalise GDPR rules and obligations and incorporate them into the same abstraction, and implement the abstraction in a model checking tool (Uppaal) in order to automatically verify compliance of business process activities with GDPR. We demonstrate the approach using a cloud-based purchase order system

Privacy‐aware cloud ecosystems: Architecture and performance

With an increasing number of cloud providers offering services made use of by both individual users and other providers, there is a realization that service provision now involves an “ecosystem” of providers. Some providers may be directly visible to a user, while others may be contributors to composite services and not directly known to the user—as only the provider offering the composite service is visible. Such services may include: domain specific services (eg, simulation), advertising services, or profiling/analytics services. Understanding the impact on data privacy of a user for such a composite service remains a challenge, and providing transparency (and obtaining user consent for data use) remains a key requirement of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). An architecture that makes use of blockchains and smart contracts is proposed that addresses this requirement. An implementation of the architecture is used to demonstrate how access control can be managed and audited. The scalability and cost of undertaking access control, as the number of actors (both service providers and “voters”) increases, is also described. The proposed approach can be used to support service aggregation across both private and public clouds

Compliance checking of cloud providers: design and implementation

The recognition of capabilities supplied by cloud systems is presently growing up. Collecting or sharing healthcare data and sensitive information especially during Covid-19 pandemic has motivated organizations and enterprises to leverage the upsides coming from cloud-based applications. However, the privacy of electronic data in such applications remains a significant challenge for cloud vendors to adapt their solutions with existing privacy legislation standards such as general data protection regulation (GDPR). This paper, first, proposes a formal model and verification for data usage requests of providers in a cloud composite service using a model checking tool. A cloud pharmacy scenario is presented to illustrate the connectivity of providers in the composite service and the stream of their requests for both collection and movement of patient data. A set of verification is, then, undertaken over the pharmacy service in accordance with three significant GDPR obligations, namely user consent, data access and data transfer. Following that, the paper designs and implements a cloud container virtualization based on the verified formal model realising GDPR requirements. The container makes use of some enforcement smart contracts to only proceed the providers’ requests, which are compliant with GDPR. Finally, several experiments are provided to investigate the performance of our approach in terms of time, memory and cost

Privacy-aware cloud ecosystems and GDPR compliance

Understanding how cloud providers support the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) remains an imporant challenge for new providers emerging on the market. GDPR influences access to, storage, processing and tranmission of data, requiring these operations to be exposed to a user to seek explicit consent. A privacy-aware cloud architecture is proposed that improves transparency and enables the audit trail of providers who accessed the user data to be recorded. The architecture not only supports GDPR compliance by imposing several data protection requirements on cloud providers, but also benefits from a blockchain network that securely stores the providers' operations on the user data. A blockchainbased tracking approach based on a shared privacy agreement implemented as a smart contract is described - providers who violate GDPR rules are automatically reported through a voting mechanism