Privacy engine for context-aware enterprise application services

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2012

This paper introduces a Context-aware Privacy Policy Language (CPPL) that enables mobile users to control who can access their context information, at what detail, and in which situation by specifying their contextaware privacy rules. Context-aware privacy rules map a set of privacy rules to one or more user's situations, in which these rules are valid. Each time a user's situation changes, a list of valid rules is updated, leaving only a subset of the specified rules to be evaluated by a privacy framework upon arrival of a context query. In the existing context-dependent privacy policy languages a user's context is used as an additional condition parameter in a privacy rule, thus all the specified privacy rules have to be evaluated when a request to access a user's context arrives. Keeping the number of rules that need to be evaluated small is important because evaluation of a large number of privacy rules can potentially increase the response time to a context query. CPPL also enables rules to be defined based on a user's social relationship with a context requestor, which reduces the number of rules that need to be defined by a user and that consequently need to be evaluated by a privacy mechanism. This paper shows that when compared to the existing context-dependent privacy policy languages, this number of rules (that are encoded using CPPL) decreases with an increasing number of user-defined situations and requestors that are represented by a small number of social relationship groups.

11th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2013), 2013

Due to the rapid advancement of communication technologies, the ability to support access control to resources in open and dynamic environments is crucial. On the one hand, users demand access to resources and services in an anywhere, anytime fashion. On the other hand, additional challenges arise when ensuring privacy and security requirements of the stakeholders in dynamically changing environments. Conventional Role-based Access Control (RBAC) systems evaluate access permissions depending on the identity/role of the users who are requesting access to resources. However, this approach does not incorporate dynamically changing context information which could have an impact on access decisions in open and dynamic environments. In such environments, an access control model with both dynamic associations of user-role and role-permission capabilities is needed. In order to achieve the above goal, this paper proposes a novel policy framework for context-aware access control (CAAC) applications that extends the RBAC model with dynamic attributes defined in an ontology. We introduce a formal language for specifying our framework including its basic elements, syntax and semantics. Our policy framework uses the relevant context information in order to enable user-role assignment, while using purpose-oriented situation information to enable role-permission assignment. We have developed a prototype to realize the framework and demonstrated the framework through a healthcare case study.

2011 IEEE Fifth International Conference on Semantic Computing, 2011

Recent years have seen a confluence of two major trends-the increase of mobile devices such as smart phones as the primary access point to networked information and the rise of social media platforms that connect people. Their convergence supports the emergence of a new class of context-aware geosocial networking applications. While existing systems focus mostly on location, our work centers on models for representing and reasoning about a more inclusive and higher-level notion of context, including the user's location and surroundings, the presence of other people and devices, and the inferred activities in which they are engaged. A key element of our work is the use of collaborative information sharing where devices share and integrate knowledge about their context. This introduces the need for privacy and security mechanisms. We present a framework to provide users with appropriate levels of privacy to protect the personal information their mobile devices are collecting, including the inferences that can be drawn from the information. We use Semantic Web technologies to specify high-level, declarative policies that describe user information sharing preferences. We have built a prototype system that aggregates information from a variety of sensors on the phone, online sources, and sources internal to the campus intranet, and infers the dynamic user context. We show how our policy framework can be effectively used to devise better privacy control mechanisms to control information flow between users in such dynamic mobile systems.

2005

Context aware computing utilizes the information embedded in physical and computational environments to provide services adaptive to users' preferences. As these services become more pervasive, the need for a service delivery mechanism arises. Due to the diversity, magnitude and nature of the contextual information, a context-based service delivery mechanism is required which can not only identify the most appropriately matching services for the interested clients but can also ensure that the contextual information is not compromised by providing services to illicit consumers. This paper focuses on the issues of service delivery in pervasive computing environments where services and clients are vast, varied and completely decoupled from each other. Semantics-based attributes are used for service registration and lookup. Privacy is maintained by incorporating policy based access control mechanisms in the service delivery modules. 1

17th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy (ACISP 2012), 2012

Context-aware systems acquire and integrate multi-faceted knowledge about their environments in order to make decisions. A number of attempts to build frameworks for context-aware systems have been made, but these have not provided adequate support for context-aware access control. In this paper, we present a framework for context-aware access control and its prototype implementation. The framework includes a context model for classifying and capturing access control-oriented contextual information, a situation model for identifying and defining contextual conditions of concern, and a policy model for specifying context-aware access control policies.

Wireless personal …, 2010

CITATIONS 10 READS 48 4 authors, including: Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: HW-secured smartphone platform supporting biometric authentication and certified security View project ITPAR Project View project

2008

middleware Recent advances in mobile communications, location/sensing technologies and data processing are boosting the deployment of context-aware services and smart spaces creation. This is reflected in urban environments by the smart-city vision, a city with advanced ICT and surveillance infrastructures offering to citizens a diversity of services. Nevertheless, privacy risks and threats ambush, since collection and process of large amount of personal data occur. Although technology enables the collection of data, its protection against abuse is left to data protection legislation. However, privacy terms to be regarded as legislature issues, should be brought down in the technological reality and carefully accounted for in devising technical solutions. In order to limit the disclosure and misuse of citizens ’ personal data, this report introduces a distributed unit of

On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2010, 2010

The paper presents a mechanism for privacy management developed for a distributed environment with the assumption that the nodes are subjected to severe resource constraints (processing power, memory). The basic idea is that the private data are filtered out in accordance with users' privacy policies before they become visible to other users. The decisions are highly localized which reduces the load related to privacy management on the computing nodes. The mechanism is hidden in middleware (the platform) and is transparent to the applications running on the nodes. The paper describes the problem and its solution in abstract terms and then presents the technical system which has been developed to demonstrate the proposed solution.

2001

Abstract In the future, a largely invisible and ubiquitous computing infrastructure will assist people with a variety of activities in the home and at work. The applications that will be deployed in such systems will create and manipulate private information and will provide access to a variety of other resources. Securing such applications is challenging for a number of reasons. Unlike traditional systems where access control has been explored, access decisions may depend on the context in which requests are made.

2011

Context-aware systems aim to deliver a richer user experience by taking into account the current user context (location, time, activity, etc.), possibly captured without his intervention. For example, cellphones are now able to continuously update the user's location while, at the same time, users execute an increasing amount of activities online, where their actions may be easily captured (e.g., login in a web application) without user consent. The potential advantages of these applications is huge, but we must not forget the important privacy issues that it creates. Particularly in distributed context-aware systems where the information that is captured may be sent to a distant server, people feel uncomfortable about exposing highly personal data, such as their location or current activity. This paper examines the current privacy management techniques and identifies four main groups: Privacy Policies, Data Perturbation, Anonymization and Lookup Notification. Each of these groups is analyzed highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of their application to Distributed Context-Aware Systems.

2008 IEEE Workshop on Policies for Distributed Systems and Networks, 2008

Context-aware service platforms use context-aware policy management solutions to manage user's privacy preferences, to manage trust relationships, and to control access to the platform resources. However, existing context-aware policy management solutions focus on at most one policy management area (e.g. trust management, or privacy, or access control) and are difficult to integrate due to their unrelated policy/context information models and semantics. This leads to an integration problem, and to a policy management nightmare, because context-aware policies of different management areas have to be managed using different tools. In this paper, we address this problem using a new context-aware policy management abstraction called Context-Aware Management Domains (CAMDs).

2011

Abstract Context-awareness enables applications to better streamline and personalize their service according to the current situation of the user. However, the user's information used by context-aware applications, such as the user's current location, is inherently private and sensitive. Using this information without proper control by the user can lead to privacy risks and might harm the trust users have in the context-aware application.

IEEE Systems Journal, 2016

This paper is intended to provide a solution for developing context-aware smart applications preserving the users' privacy in the Internet of Things (IoT). In this sense, we present a framework called Semantic Web-based Context Management (SeCoMan) aimed at offering a set of predefined queries to provide applications with information about indoor location of users and objects, as well as context-aware services. SeCoMan uses a semantic-oriented IoT vision where semantic technologies play a key role. In fact, SeCoMan uses Semantic Web for modeling description of things, reasoning over data to infer new knowledge, and defining context-aware policies. SeCoMan also defines a layered architecture, including functions related to the management of the users' privacy in a manner that accommodate IoT requirements, in addition to not affecting system performance nor introducing excessive overheads. A thorough discussion on other related works, together with some experiments to measure the throughput and scalability, confirm that SeCoMan is a solution that improves the most relevant proposals existing so far.

International Journal of Computer Network and Information Security, 2012

Context-awareness has long been an important building block in designing systems that vary their operating behavior based on an analysis of rapidly changing operating conditions. There is the need however to define context more formally so that context datasharing can take place between systems and more complex interactions between connected systems can be developed. The area of computer security is examined in particular as an area where the representation and sharing of context data can lead to more effective policy enforcement. A framework is proposed for sharing data between assessment sensors and enforcement mechanisms in order to facilitate more accurate policy enforcement. A detailed performance analysis of the proposed system is offered along with conclusions on the feasibility of such systems.

2006 ACS/IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Services, 2006

Context awareness is an essential cornerstone in future pervasive computing systems. It has the potential to greatly reduce the user attention and interaction bottlenecks, to give humans the impression that services fade into the background, and to support intelligent personalization features. Nevertheless, in order to create such an environment, a growing amount of personal information has to be provided to the system, either manually or automatically. Hence the digital trace and representation users have in the system is getting dangerously detailed, thus stressing the need for privacy protection. DAIDALOS 1 is a European research project in the area of 3G and beyond, which aims to combine heterogeneous networks in a transparent and seamless way, and develop on top of this a pervasive environment for applications and end-users. This paper describes the main models and mechanisms that have been established to provide federated contextaware services and protect the privacy of their users.