Shi-Cho Cha

From P3P to Data Licenses

P3P provides a standard means for Web sites to disclose their privacy policies when they need users’ personal data for processing. A user can then decide whether or not to provide personal data to the sites based on the disclosed policies. The decision process can also be made automatic through an agent or browser via the privacy preferences set by the user. As can be seen, however, this mechanism cannot guarantee that Web sites do act according to their policies once they have obtained user’s personal data. In light of this, we proposed a new technical and legal approach, called Online Personal Data Licensing (OPDL). The idea is that the use of a person’s data must be authorized by the person through the issue of data licenses. Licenses can then be checked to prevent personal data from being misused. This paper focuses on the implementation of OPDL. As P3P provides a standard format for expressing privacy practices about personal data, we use it here to implement data licenses.

RiskPatrol: A risk management system considering the integration risk management with business continuity processes

Both business continuity management (BCM) and risk management (RM) processes are very important to current organizations. The former ensures that the organizations have the ability to limit losses in the events of severe contingencies or disasters. The latter helps organizations identify potential security incidents and adopt cost-effective countermeasures to the incidents. However, current risk management approaches or methodologies usually ignore the different focuses about risks in RM processes and BCM processes. Therefore, even though an organization has established its RM processes, it may need to re-assess the risks for BCM processes. In light of this, we propose a risk management system, called RiskPatrol, to provide an integrative view about risks for RM and BCM processes. RiskPatrol provides an easy way for people to retain enough information for BCM while they do risk assessment in RM process, and vice versa. As the redundant risk assessment work in RM and BCM processes can be reduced, our system can hopefully contribute to overcome the deficiencies of current risk management approaches.

Ensuring the integrity and non-repudiation of remitting e-invoices in conventional channels with commercially available NFC devices

Despite the globally recognized advantages of e-invoicing and various efforts to implement such systems, retailers and stores may still have difficulties in promoting purely paperless e-invoices due to the lack of a convenient and secure way for consumers to receive and retrieve the e-invoices. As such, paper-based invoices may still be issued along with e-invoices, contradicting an important benefit of e-invoicing - paper consumption reduction. Thanks to the advances in smart phones and Near Field Communication (NFC) technologies, e-invoices can be delivered via NFC-enabled smartpones, allowing consumers to examine the content immediately after transactions and to easily retrieve them later on. Still, an extra security mechanism is needed to ensure the integrity and non-repudiation of the content, as invoices may bear some value and thus become the target of a security attack. In this paper, we propose a secure NFC-based e-invoice remitting scheme using standard NFC P2P communications, and discuss how it fulfills major security requirements, including authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiation. The proposed system is also implemented and tested in Taiwans e-invoicing system.

Process-Oriented Approach for Validating Asset Value for Evaluating Information Security Risk

To provide a systematic means of identifying and assessing information security risks, organizations typically adopt asset-driven (or asset-oriented) risk assessment schemes. These schemes require organizations to identify their information assets, find out potential incidents to those assets, and assess expected losses associated with those incidents. While asset value is important in determining loss expectancies for associated incidents, the accuracy of asset valuation is crucial. Although numerous guidelines exist regarding how best to evaluate asset value, current risk assessment schemes generally overlook how to validate assessments of asset value. Consequently, this work presents a process-oriented approach that organizations can employ to validate and adjust asset value. The approach presented in this study can help organizations represent their business processes and information assets used in those processes using flowcharts, and also mark dependencies among assets based on confidentiality, integrity, and availability requirements on flowcharts. Organizations can use the markings of dependencies to validate and correct results associated with asset valuation. If organizations can more accurately evaluate asset value, they can improve the effectiveness of their risk assessment. Therefore, the approach presented in this study can hopefully help improve organizational information security.

Robalo: A Risk-Oriented Job Dispatching Mechanism for Workforce Management System

We proposed a framework, called Risk-Oriented joB dispAtching for mobiLe workfOrce management system (ROBALO), to ease the tension between (a) the reliability requirement to serve a job request, and (b) the cost of the job’s assignment. In ROBALO, the risks for workers to execute a job are taken into consideration. Such consideration is especially useful in the scenario of mobile workforce management because mobile workers usually meet unexpected situations in the field. Therefore, we can find the job assignment with the minimum cost under a certain degree of risk. Therefore, the job dispatcher can reserve enough resources and make enough preparations for a incident. In tradition, job dispatching mechanism usually take exception handling processes to deal with the failure of job execution. Compared to this approach, the time to discover the failure can be saved because we try to do things right at the first time.

Building universal profile systems over a peer-to-peer network

We propose personal data backbone (PDB) to provide universal profile services over peer-to-peer networks. The main objective is to bring the control of personal data back to their owners. By using peer-to-peer technology, people can collaborate with one another to establish the services without resorting to a centralized mechanism or corporation, thereby removing concerns such as privacy, security, and monopoly. The peer-to-peer technology also achieves better trust, availability, accountability, and reliability, as compared to the centralized ones.

Duplicate Work Reduction in Business Continuity and Risk Management Processes

Business continuity management (BCM) and risk management (RM) processes are very important to current organizations. The former ensures that organizations can limit losses after severe contingencies or disasters. The latter helps organizations identify potential security incidents and adopt the most cost-effective countermeasures. However, current risk management approaches or methodologies do not reflect the important differences between RM and BCM processes. Therefore, even an organization that has established RM processes may need to re-assess the risks for BCM processes. In light of this, this study proposes RiskPatrol, a risk management system that provides an integrated view of risks associated with RM and BCM processes. RiskPatrol provides an easy way for users to retain enough information for BCM while they perform risk assessment in RM processes, and vice versa. The proposed approach can improve the efficiency of establishing information security management systems by minimizing redundancies in RM and BCM processes.

On derived data services in cyberspace

We propose a framework, called derived data services (DDS), to ease the tension between (a) the need to mine individuals Web usage logs across multiple sites for aiding in personalization, and (b) the inherent privacy risks in it. In DDS, a standardized, hierarchical, format can be developed, whereby some higher level abstractions from a usage log can be captured, and potentially used across multiple applications. The hierarchical data structure also allows derived data to be processed incrementally based on the level of information needed, and on the level of privacy an individual wishes to have. The derived data summarizes an individuals profile in cyberspace, and should be the legal property of the individual so that access to the profile must be legally authorized by the person.

A passport-like service over an agent-based peer-to-peer network

We propose Personal Data Backbone (PDB) to provide Passport-like services over an agent-based peer-to-peer network. The main objective is to bring the control of personal data back to their owner. By applying technologies in agents and in peer-to-peer networks, PDB enables flexible and secure personal data acquisition in a spontaneous network formed by participating users.