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Enterprise Privacy Technologies
Enterprises use privacy statements to promise privacy to customers and to
set up their internal policies for dealing with employee and other personal data.
The focus of this work is a comprehensive methodology for
managing and enforcing these promises throughout an enterprise.
This includes three main elements:
- An overall architecture for enterprise privacy.
- A formal language for formalizing privacy policies, together
with suitable operations for typical usage.
- An architecture for privacy enforcement throughout an enterprise.
We will now describe these building blocks in more detail.
The IBM Enterprise Privacy Architecture (EPA)
The IBM Enterprise Privacy Architecture is a methodology for
enterprises to provide an enhanced and well-defined level of privacy
to their customers. This includes privacy-friendly business
processes, privacy-enabling security technology, and enterprise
privacy management.
Privacy-friendly business process are derived from ordinary business
processes by minimizing the data needed to provide the desired
services. It may include switching to equivalent service alternatives
that require less personal data. It may also utilize privacy-enabled
security technology.
Even with privacy-friendly business processes and security technology,
enterprises still collect a certain amount of personal data. In order
to protect the privacy of the consumers, a privacy-enabled enterprise
will promise fair information practices to its customers. These are
stated in a privacy policy and can be formalized using P3P. Enterprise
privacy management is a privacy-enabled way to manage the collected
data of an enterprise while enforcing the privacy-promises that have
been made.
Submission to W3C, 2003.
One part of our research
is a formal language for defining enterprise privacy
practices. Enterprises promise a certain level of privacy to its
customers using privacy statements or the Platform for Privacy
Preferences (P3P). The formal language can then be used to formalize
these promises. By automated enforcement of these enterprise-specific
privacy practices, enterprises are enabled to comply with the promises
made.
A privacy policy describes the privacy practices as well as
the opt-in and opt-out choices of an individual. Policies are
then associated with all data collected by an enterprise. This "sticky
policy paradigm" mandates that policy sticks to the data, travels with
it, and can be used to decide how the data can be used. By separating
application- and enterprise-dependent deployment information from the
actual policies, E-P3P policies can be used and controls the flow and
usage of data inside and among enterprises.
The sticky policy paradigm necessitates certain operations on policies
in an enterprise,
e.g., comparing whether data can be forwarded to a second enterprise
that has its own policy. We develop a toolbox of such operations.
A Component Architecture for Enforcing Privacy Policies
Another part of our research is to define an architecture that
enforces policies throughout an enterprise. This includes a policy
evaluation engine as well as privacy-enabled resource monitors that
enforce the policy for a variety of resources.
Publications
(For other publications of the authors see the
group publications page.)
- M. Hondo, T. Nadalin, R. Nagaratnam, M. Kudo, G. Karjoth,
B. Pfitzmann, M. Schunter:
Position Paper: Privacy Policies as a Component of Policy-enabled Governance;
W3C Workshop on Languages for Privacy Policy Negotiation and
Semantics-Driven Enforcement, Oct. 2006,
http://www.w3.org/2006/07/privacy-ws/.
- Ch. Vanden Berghe, M. Schunter: Privacy Injector -
Automated Privacy Enforcement Through Aspects;
Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2006, 99-117.
- M. Nelson, M. Schunter, M. McCullough, J. Bliss:
Trust on Demand -- Enabling Privacy, Security, Transparency, and
Accountability in Distributed Systems;
33rd Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC),
Sept. 2005, Arlington, USA.
- M. Backes, M. Duermuth, R. Steinwandt:
An Algebra for Composing Enterprise Privacy Policies,
9th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS 2004),
LNCS 3193, Springer-Verlag, Berlin 2004, 33-52.
- M. Backes, M. Duermuth, G. Karjoth:
Unification in Privacy Policy Evaluation - Translating EPAL to Prolog.
5th IEEE Intern. Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks (POLICY),
2004.
- M. Backes, W. Bagga, G. Karjoth, M. Schunter:
Efficient Comparison of Enterprise Privacy Policies,
to appear 19th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, Special Track "Security",
Nicosia, Cyprus, March 2004.
- M. Backes, B. Pfitzmann, M. Schunter:
A Toolkit for Managing Enterprise Privacy Policies,
8th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS 2003),
LNCS 2808, Springer-Verlag, Berlin 2003, 162-180.
copyright Springer-Verlag, Berling Heidelberg 2003.
Won Award for
Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies 2004.
- G. Karjoth, M. Schunter, E. Van Herreweghen, M. Waidner:
Amending P3P for Clearer Privacy Promises;
Trust and Privacy in Digital Business -- TrustBus 03.
In 14th Intíl Workshop on Database and Expert Systems Applications (DEXA),
IEEE Press, Prague, 2003, 445-449.
- G. Karjoth, M. Schunter, E. Van Herreweghen:
Enterprise Privacy Practices vs. Privacy Promises
-- How to Promise What You Can Keep;
4th IEEE International Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and
Networks (Policy ’03), 2003, 135-146.
- P. Ashley, M. Schunter: The Platform for Enterprise Privacy
Practices, Information Security Solutions Europe (ISSE), Paris,
2002.
- P. Ashley, M. Schunter, C. Powers: From Privacy Promises to
Privacy Management --- A New Approach for Enforcing Privacy
Throughout an Enterprise, ACM New Security Paradigms Workshop
(NSPW), Virginia Beach VA, 2002.
- G. Karjoth, M. Schunter: A Privacy Policy Model for
Enterprises, 15th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop,
Toronto, 2002.
- G. Karjoth, M. Schunter, M. Waidner: Platform for Enterprise
Privacy Practices, Privacy-enhancing Technologies (PET), San
Francisco, 2002.
- G. Karjoth, M. Schunter, M. Waidner:
Privacy-enabled Services for Enterprises; Workshop on Trust and
Privacy in e-Business (TrustBus), Aix-en-Provence, 2002.
- G. Karjoth, M. Schunter, M. Waidner: Unternehmensweites
Datenschutzmanagement; In "Datenschutz als Wettbewerbsvorteil",
Vieweg, 2002.
Cooperations
Links
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