Exploratory Study of the Privacy Extension for System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA-Priv) to elicit Privacy Risks in eHealth

Context: System Theoretic Process Analysis for Privacy (STPA-Priv) is a novel privacy risk elicitation method using a top down approach. It has not gotten very much attention but may offer a convenient structured approach and generation of additional artifacts compared to other methods. Aim: The aim of this exploratory study is to find out what benefits the privacy risk elicitation method STPA-Priv has and to explain how the method can be used. Method: Therefore we apply STPA-Priv to a real world health scenario that involves a smart glucose measurement device used by children. Different kinds of data from the smart device including location data should be shared with the parents, physicians, and urban planners. This makes it a sociotechnical system that offers adequate and complex privacy risks to be found. Results: We find out that STPA-Priv is a structured method for privacy analysis and finds complex privacy risks. The method is supported by a tool called XSTAMPP which makes the analysis and its results more profound. Additionally, we learn that an iterative application of the steps might be necessary to find more privacy risks when more information about the system is available later. Conclusions: STPA-Priv helps to identify complex privacy risks that are derived from sociotechnical interactions in a system. It also outputs privacy constraints that are to be enforced by the system to ensure privacy.Comment: author's post-prin

Investigating privacy in an ambient world

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) and ubiquitous computing allow us to consider a future where computation is embedded into our daily social lives. This vision raises its own important questions and augments the need to understand how people will achieve and maintain privacy. As a result, we have recently conducted a wide reaching study of people’s attitudes to potential AmI scenarios with a view to eliciting their privacy concerns. The focus of this paper will be on the method used and preliminary findings will be discussed

A Decentralised Digital Identity Architecture

Current architectures to validate, certify, and manage identity are based on centralised, top-down approaches that rely on trusted authorities and third-party operators. We approach the problem of digital identity starting from a human rights perspective, with a primary focus on identity systems in the developed world. We assert that individual persons must be allowed to manage their personal information in a multitude of different ways in different contexts and that to do so, each individual must be able to create multiple unrelated identities. Therefore, we first define a set of fundamental constraints that digital identity systems must satisfy to preserve and promote privacy as required for individual autonomy. With these constraints in mind, we then propose a decentralised, standards-based approach, using a combination of distributed ledger technology and thoughtful regulation, to facilitate many-to-many relationships among providers of key services. Our proposal for digital identity differs from others in its approach to trust in that we do not seek to bind credentials to each other or to a mutually trusted authority to achieve strong non-transferability. Because the system does not implicitly encourage its users to maintain a single aggregated identity that can potentially be constrained or reconstructed against their interests, individuals and organisations are free to embrace the system and share in its benefits.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures, 3 table

Challenges of Multi-Factor Authentication for Securing Advanced IoT (A-IoT) Applications

The unprecedented proliferation of smart devices together with novel communication, computing, and control technologies have paved the way for the Advanced Internet of Things~(A-IoT). This development involves new categories of capable devices, such as high-end wearables, smart vehicles, and consumer drones aiming to enable efficient and collaborative utilization within the Smart City paradigm. While massive deployments of these objects may enrich people's lives, unauthorized access to the said equipment is potentially dangerous. Hence, highly-secure human authentication mechanisms have to be designed. At the same time, human beings desire comfortable interaction with their owned devices on a daily basis, thus demanding the authentication procedures to be seamless and user-friendly, mindful of the contemporary urban dynamics. In response to these unique challenges, this work advocates for the adoption of multi-factor authentication for A-IoT, such that multiple heterogeneous methods - both well-established and emerging - are combined intelligently to grant or deny access reliably. We thus discuss the pros and cons of various solutions as well as introduce tools to combine the authentication factors, with an emphasis on challenging Smart City environments. We finally outline the open questions to shape future research efforts in this emerging field.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. The work has been accepted for publication in IEEE Network, 2019. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Securing The Root: A Proposal For Distributing Signing Authority

Management of the Domain Name System (DNS) root zone file is a uniquely global policy problem. For the Internet to connect everyone, the root must be coordinated and compatible. While authority over the legacy root zone file has been contentious and divisive at times, everyone agrees that the Internet should be made more secure. A newly standardized protocol, DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC), would make the Internet's infrastructure more secure. In order to fully implement DNSSEC, the procedures for managing the DNS root must be revised. Therein lies an opportunity. In revising the root zone management procedures, we can develop a new solution that diminishes the impact of the legacy monopoly held by the U.S. government and avoids another contentious debate over unilateral U.S. control. In this paper we describe the outlines of a new system for the management of a DNSSEC-enabled root. Our proposal distributes authority over securing the root, unlike another recently suggested method, while avoiding the risks and pitfalls of an intergovernmental power sharing scheme

Passport: Enabling Accurate Country-Level Router Geolocation using Inaccurate Sources

When does Internet traffic cross international borders? This question has major geopolitical, legal and social implications and is surprisingly difficult to answer. A critical stumbling block is a dearth of tools that accurately map routers traversed by Internet traffic to the countries in which they are located. This paper presents Passport: a new approach for efficient, accurate country-level router geolocation and a system that implements it. Passport provides location predictions with limited active measurements, using machine learning to combine information from IP geolocation databases, router hostnames, whois records, and ping measurements. We show that Passport substantially outperforms existing techniques, and identify cases where paths traverse countries with implications for security, privacy, and performance