With the advancements in the enterprise-level business development, the demand for new applications and services is overwhelming. For the development and delivery of such applications and services, enterprise businesses rely on Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In essence, API is a double-edged sword. On one hand, API provides ease of expanding the business through sharing value and utility, but on another hand it raises security and privacy issues. Since the applications usually use APIs to retrieve important data, therefore it is extremely important to make sure that an effective access control and security mechanism are in place , and the data does not fall into wrong hands. In this article, we discuss the current state of the enterprise API security and the role of Machine Learning (ML) in API security. We also discuss the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance and its effect on the API security.
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), enforced from 25th May 2018, aims to reform how organisations view and control the personal data of private EU citizens. The scope of GDPR is somewhat unprecedented: it regulates every aspect of personal data handling, includes hefty potential penalties for non-compliance, and can prosecute any company in the world that processes EU citizens' data. In this paper, we look behind the scenes to investigate the real challenges faced by organisations in engaging with the GDPR. This considers issues in working with the regulation, the implementation …
The purpose of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is to provide improved privacy protection. If an app controls personal data from users, it needs to be compliant with GDPR. However, GDPR lists general rules rather than exact step-by-step guidelines about how to develop an app that fulfills the requirements. Therefore, there may exist GDPR compliance violations in existing apps, which would pose severe privacy threats to app users. In this paper, we take mobile health applications (mHealth apps) as a peephole to examine the status quo of GDPR compliance in Android apps. We first pro…
The transparent and decentralized characteristics associated with blockchain can be both appealing and problematic when applied to a healthcare use-case. As health data is highly sensitive, it is also highly regulated to ensure the privacy of patients. At the same time, access to health data and interoperability is in high demand. Regulatory frameworks such as GDPR and HIPAA are, amongst other objectives, meant to contribute to mitigating the risk of privacy violations in health data. Blockchain features can likely improve interoperability and access control to health data, and at the same tim…
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to ensure that all personal data processing activities are fair and transparent for the European Union (EU) citizens, regardless of whether these are carried out within the EU or anywhere else. To this end, it sets strict requirements to transfer personal data outside the EU. However, checking these requirements is a daunting task for supervisory authorities, particularly in the mobile app domain due to the huge number of apps available and their dynamic nature. In this paper, we propose a fully automated method to assess the compliance of mob…
IBM Research - Haifa（IBM研究部 - 海法）；Haifa University Campus（海法大学校园）
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) mandates the principle of data minimization, which requires that only data necessary to fulfill a certain purpose be collected. However, it can often be difficult to determine the minimal amount of data required, especially in complex machine learning models such as neural networks. We present a first-of-a-kind method to reduce the amount of personal data needed to perform predictions with a machine learning model, by removing or generalizing some of the input features. Our method makes use of the knowledge encoded within the model to produce a …
Many Android applications collect data from users. When they do, they must protect this collected data according to the current legal frameworks. Such data protection has become even more important since the European Union rolled out the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). App developers have limited tool support to reason about data protection throughout their app development process. Although many Android applications state a privacy policy, privacy policy compliance checks are currently manual, expensive, and prone to error. One of the major challenges in privacy audits is the signif…
Sharding has emerged as one of the common techniques to address the scalability problems of blockchain systems. To this end, various sharding techniques for blockchain systems have been proposed in the literature. When sharded blockchains process personal data, the data controllers and the data processors associated with the sharded blockchains need to be compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To this end, this article makes the first attempt to address the following key question: to what extent the existing techniques developed by different communities such as the distr…
A core requirement for GDPR compliance is the maintenance of a register of processing activities (ROPA). Our analysis of six ROPA templates from EU data protection regulators shows the scope and granularity of a ROPA is subject to widely varying guidance in different jurisdictions. We present a consolidated data model based on common concepts and relationships across analysed templates. We then analyse the extent of using the Data Privacy Vocabulary - a vocabulary specification for GDPR. We show that the DPV currently does not provide sufficient concepts to represent the ROPA data model and pr…
The GDPR grants data subjects certain rights, like the right to access their data from companies, but in practice multiple problems exist with exercising these rights such as unknown data holders or interpreting the received data. Small and medium enterprises on the other hand need to facilitate the obligations given by the GDPR, but often lack proper systems, staff and other resources to do so effectively. For the GDPR to be effective in practice, these problems need to be addressed. With the work at hand we provide an overview of existing software solutions for these problems (from an intern…
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) forces IT companies to comply with a number of principles when dealing with European citizens' personal data. Non-compliant companies are exposed to penalties which may represent up to 4% of their turnover. Currently, it is very hard for companies driven by personal data to make their applications GDPR-compliant, especially if those applications were developed before the GDPR was established. We present rgpdOS, a GDPR-aware operating system that aims to bring GDPR-compliance to every application, while requiring minimal changes to application code.
Enforcing data protection and privacy rules within large data processing applications is becoming increasingly important, especially in the light of GDPR and similar regulatory frameworks. Most modern data processing happens on top of a distributed storage layer, and securing this layer against accidental or malicious misuse is crucial to ensuring global privacy guarantees. However, the performance overhead and the additional complexity for this is often assumed to be significant -- in this work we describe a path forward that tackles both challenges. We propose "Software-Defined Data Protecti…
The creation and maintenance of a Register of Processing Activities (ROPA) is an essential process for the demonstration of GDPR compliance. We analyse ROPA templates from six EU Data Protection Regulators and show that template scope and granularity vary widely between jurisdictions. We then propose a flexible, consolidated data model for consistent processing of ROPAs (CSM-ROPA). We analyse the extent that the Data Privacy Vocabulary (DPV) can be used to express CSM-ROPA. We find that it does not directly address modelling ROPAs, and so needs additional concept definitions. We provide a mapp…
In recent years, our society is being plagued by unprecedented levels of privacy and security breaches. To rein in this trend, the European Union, in 2018, introduced a comprehensive legislation called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In this paper, we review GDPR from a system design perspective, and identify how its regulations conflict with the design, architecture, and operation of modern systems. We illustrate these conflicts via the seven GDPR sins: storing data forever; reusing data indiscriminately; walled gardens and black markets; risk-agnostic data processing; hiding d…
Since GDPR came into force in May 2018, companies have worked on their data practices to comply with this privacy law. In particular, since the privacy policy is the essential communication channel for users to understand and control their privacy, many companies updated their privacy policies after GDPR was enforced. However, most privacy policies are verbose, full of jargon, and vaguely describe companies' data practices and users' rights. Therefore, it is unclear if they comply with GDPR. In this paper, we create a privacy policy dataset of 1,080 websites labeled with the 18 GDPR requiremen…
University of Wisconsin（威斯康星大学）；École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of the most demanding and comprehensive privacy regulations of all time. A year after it went into effect, we study its impact on the landscape of privacy policies online. We conduct the first longitudinal, in-depth, and at-scale assessment of privacy policies before and after the GDPR. We gauge the complete consumption cycle of these policies, from the first user impressions until the compliance assessment. We create a diverse corpus of two sets of 6,278 unique English-language privacy policies from inside and outside the EU, covering th…
As a result of the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive, European users encounter cookie banners on almost every website. Many of such banners are implemented by Consent Management Providers (CMPs), who respect the IAB Europe's Transparency and Consent Framework (TCF). Via cookie banners, CMPs collect and disseminate user consent to third parties. In this work, we systematically study IAB Europe's TCF and analyze consent stored behind the user interface of TCF cookie banners. We analyze the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive to identify legal violations in implementations of cookie banners based on th…
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) gives control of personal data back to the owners by appointing higher requirements and obligations on service providers who manage and process personal data. As the verification of GDPR-compliance, handled by a supervisory authority, is irregularly conducted; it is challenging to be certified that a service provider has been continuously adhering to the GDPR. Furthermore, it is beyond the data owner's capability to perceive whether a service provider complies with the GDPR and effectively protects her personal data. This motivates us to envision a…
National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences（国家计算机与新兴科学大学）
Privacy Policies are the legal documents that describe the practices that an organization or company has adopted in the handling of the personal data of its users. But as policies are a legal document, they are often written in extensive legal jargon that is difficult to understand. Though work has been done on privacy policies but none that caters to the problem of verifying if a given privacy policy adheres to the data protection laws of a given country or state. We aim to bridge that gap by providing a framework that analyzes privacy policies in light of various data protection laws, such a…
The recently introduced General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires that when obtaining information online that could be used to identify individuals, their consents must be obtained. Among other things, this affects many common forms of cookies, and users in the EU have been presented with notices asking their approvals for data collection. This paper examines the prevalence of third party cookies before and after GDPR by using two datasets: accesses to top 500 websites according to Alexa.com, and weekly data of cookies placed in users' browsers by websites accessed by 16 UK and China …
Big data has become a great asset for many organizations, promising improved operations and new business opportunities. However, big data has increased access to sensitive information that when processed can directly jeopardize the privacy of individuals and violate data protection laws. As a consequence, data controllers and data processors may be imposed tough penalties for non-compliance that can result even to bankruptcy. In this paper, we discuss the current state of the legal regulations and analyze different data protection and privacy-preserving techniques in the context of big data an…
SnT Centre for Security, Reliability, and Trust, University of Luxembourg（卢森堡大学SnT安全、可靠性与信任中心）；University of Ottawa（渥太华大学）；Texas A&M University – Central Texas（得克萨斯农工大学中央得克萨斯分校）
Technological advances in information sharing have raised concerns about data protection. Privacy policies contain privacy-related requirements about how the personal data of individuals will be handled by an organization or a software system (e.g., a web service or an app). In Europe, privacy policies are subject to compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A prerequisite for GDPR compliance checking is to verify whether the content of a privacy policy is complete according to the provisions of GDPR. Incomplete privacy policies might result in large fines on violating org…
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union is the most famous recently enacted privacy regulation. Despite of the regulation's legal, political, and technological ramifications, relatively little research has been carried out for better understanding the GDPR's practical implications for requirements engineering and software architectures. Building on a grounded theory approach with close ties to the Finnish software industry, this paper contributes to the sealing of this gap in previous research. Three questions are asked and answered in the context of software develo…
Vienna University of Economics and Business（维也纳经济大学）；Universita di Napoli Federico II（那不勒斯费德里科二世大学）；Tenforce（Tenforce公司）；W3C（万维网联盟）
The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) brings new challenges for companies who must ensure they have an appropriate legal basis for processing personal data and must provide transparency with respect to personal data processing and sharing within and between organisations. Additionally, when it comes to consent as a legal basis, companies need to ensure that they comply with usage constraints specified by data subjects. This paper presents the policy language and supporting ontologies and vocabularies, developed within the SPECIAL EU H2020 project, which can be used to represen…
Increased levels of digitalization in society expose companies to new security threats, requiring them to establish adequate security and privacy measures. Additionally, the presence of exogenous forces like new regulations, e.g., GDPR and the global COVID-19 pandemic, pose new challenges for companies that should preserve an adequate level of security while having to adapt to change. In this paper, we investigate such challenges through a two-phase study in companies located in Denmark -- a country characterized by a high level of digitalization and trust -- focusing on software development a…
In this chapter, we review how the EU cybersecurity regulatory framework impacts providers of cloud computing services. We examine the evolving regulatory treatment of cloud services as an enabler of the EU's digital economy and question whether all cloud services should be treated as critical infrastructure. Further, we look at how the safeguarding and incident notification obligations under the General Data Protection Regulation ('GDPR') and the Network and Information Systems Directive ('NISD') apply to cloud providers. We also consider the proposed revision of the NISD and look at newly de…
We introduce a new model for evaluating privacy that builds on the criteria proposed by the EuroPriSe certification scheme by adding usability criteria. Our model is visually represented through a cube, called Usable Privacy Cube (or UP Cube), where each of its three axes of variability captures, respectively: rights of the data subjects, privacy principles, and usable privacy criteria. We slightly reorganize the criteria of EuroPriSe to fit with the UP Cube model, i.e., we show how EuroPriSe can be viewed as a combination of only rights and principles, forming the two axes at the basis of our…
When building machine learning models using sensitive data, organizations should ensure that the data processed in such systems is adequately protected. For projects involving machine learning on personal data, Article 35 of the GDPR mandates it to perform a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA). In addition to the threats of illegitimate access to data through security breaches, machine learning models pose an additional privacy risk to the data by indirectly revealing about it through the model predictions and parameters. Guidances released by the Information Commissioner's Office (UK) an…
Soteria is a user right management system designed to safeguard user-data privacy in a transparent and provable manner in compliance to regulations such as GDPR and CCPA. Soteria represents user data rights as formal executable sharing agreements, which can automatically be translated into a human readable form and enforced as data are queried. To support revocation and to prove compliance, an indelible, audited trail of the hash of data access and sharing agreements are stored on a two-layer distributed ledger. The main chain ensures partition tolerance and availability (PA) properties while …
