Server-Centric P3P

Abstract

We propose a server-centric architecture for P3P that reuses database technology for implementation, as opposed to the prevailing client-centric implementations based on specialized engines. The server-centric implementation has several advantages including: setting up the infrastructure necessary for ensuring that web sites act according to their stated policies, allowing P3P to be deployed in thin, mobile clients that are likely to dominate Internet access in the future, and allowing site owners to refine their policies based on the privacy preferences of their users. Our experiments indicate that it performs significantly better than the sole public-domain client-centric implementation and that the latency introduced by preference matching is small enough for real-world deployments of P3P. We believe a good future direction for P3P would be to standardize on the server-centric architecture as an alternative to the current client-centric architecture