Privacy analysis using ontologies

  • Authors:
  • Martin Kost;Johann Christoph Freytag

  • Affiliations:
  • Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany;Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the second ACM conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

As information systems extensively exchange information between participants, privacy concerns may arise from potential misuse. Existing design approaches consider non-technical privacy requirements of different stakeholders during the design and the implementation of a system. However, a technical approach for privacy analysis is largely missing. This paper introduces a formal approach for technically evaluating an information system with respect to its designed or implemented privacy protection. In particular, we introduce a system model that describes various system aspects such as its information flow. We define the semantics of this system model by using ontologies. Based on the system model together with a given privacy ontology, and given privacy requirements we analyze the modeled system to detect privacy leakages and to calculate privacy indicators. The proposed method provides a technical approach to check whether a system conforms to the privacy requirements of the stakeholders or not.