Paul Anthony Ashley

E-P3P privacy policies and privacy authorization

Enterprises collect large amounts of personal data from their customers. To ease privacy concerns, enterprises publish privacy statements that outline how data is used and shared. The Platform for Enterprise Privacy Practices (E-P3P) defines a fine-grained privacy policy model. A Chief Privacy Officer can use E-P3P to formalize the desired enterprise-internal handling of collected data. A particular data user is then allowed to use certain collected data for a given purpose if and only if the E-P3P authorization engine allows this request based on the applicable E-P3P policy. By enforcing such formalized privacy practices, E-P3P enables enterprises to keep their promises and prevent accidental privacy violations.

Wired versus wireless security: the Internet, WAP and iMode for E-commerce

The perceived lack of security in the wireless environment has delayed many initiatives in providing access to E-commerce applications from wireless devices. Many organizations are skeptical that the same kind of security protections that they are used to in the current Internet (wired) E-commerce environment are also available for wireless transactions. We show that these perceptions are misplaced. We describe the security properties and mechanisms available for Internet (wired), WAP based and iMode E-commerce. We find that both WAP and iMode provide excellent security features and are geared to provide other security provisions over and above those commonly available in a wired environment.

Privacy promises, access control, and privacy management. Enforcing privacy throughout an enterprise by extending access control

Regulations and consumer backlash force many organizations to re-evaluate the way they manage private data. As a first step, they publish privacy promises as text or P3P. These promises are not backed up by privacy technology that enforces the promises throughout the enterprise. Privacy tools cover fractions of the problem while leaving the main challenge unanswered. This article describes a new approach towards enterprisewide enforcement of the privacy promises. Its core is a new framework for managing collected personal data in a sensitive, trustworthy way. The framework enables enterprises to publish clear privacy promises, to collect and manage user preferences and consent, and to enforce the privacy promises throughout the enterprise. This article shows how this new approach extends the traditional view of access control to provide a more complete coverage of privacy management issues.

Applying authorization to intranets: architectures, issues and APIs

There are a number of proposed solutions to solve the Intranet authorization problem. They fall into two categories: architectures for providing an authorization framework, and generic authorization application programmer interfaces (APIs) for allowing applications access to the authorization services. This paper examines the leading initiatives in these areas: DCE, SESAME and Windows2000 as authorization frameworks and the GSS-API, GAA-API and AZN-API. The paper stresses the important issues related to implementing an authorization service.

Secure Authorisation Agent for Cross-Domain Access Control in a Mobile Computing Environment

New portable computers and wireless communication technologies have significantly enhanced mobile computing. The emergence of network technology that supports user mobility and universal network access has prompted new requirements and concerns, especially in the aspects of access control and security. In this paper, we propose a new approach using authorisation agents for cross-domain access control in a mobile computing environment. Our framework consists of three main components, namely centralised authorisation servers, authorisation tokens and authorisation agents. An infrastructure of centralised authorisation servers and application servers from different domains is proposed for supporting trust propagation to mobile hosts instantaneously. While the authorisation token is a form of static capability, the authorisation agent on the client side can be regarded as a dynamic capability to provide the functionality in client-server interactions. It works collaboratively with remote servers to provide authorisation service with finer access granularity and higher flexibility.