Tyrone Grandison

Extending relational database systems to automatically enforce privacy policies

Databases are at the core of successful businesses. Due to the voluminous stores of personal data being held by companies today, preserving privacy has become a crucial requirement for operating a business. This paper proposes how current relational database management systems can be transformed into their privacy-preserving equivalents. Specifically, we present language constructs and implementation design for fine-grained access control to achieve this goal.

Towards a Formal Definition of a Computing Cloud

Cloud computing has been endorsed by the IT community as the new paradigm shift in the industry that charts the way forward. Unfortunately, the field is still on its path to rigor and robustness. This is epitomized by the numerous fuzzy articulations of “what is cloud computing”. This paper makes a first attempt at remedying this conundrum by providing a core technical specification of the model for cloud computing and demonstrating how current and future cloud deployments can use this to foster more productive technical discussion in future.

Enabling the 21st century health care information technology revolution

The U.S. governments vision of the health care information infrastructure is possible using technologies that support the sharing of medical e-records while maintaining patient privacy.

Compliance with data protection laws using hippocratic database active enforcement and auditing

Governments worldwide are enacting data protection laws that restrict the disclosure and processing of personal information. These laws impose administrative and financial burdens on companies that manage personal information and may hinder the legitimate and valuable sharing and analysis of this information. In this paper we describe an integrated set of technologies, known as the Hippocratic Database (HDB), which enables compliance with security and privacy regulations without impeding the legitimate flow of information. HDBs Control Center allows companies to specify fine-grained disclosure policies based on the role of the user, the purpose of the access, the intended recipient, and other disclosure conditions. Its Active Enforcement component transparently enforces these policies by transforming user queries in a middleware layer to ensure that the database returns only policy-compliant information. HDBs Compliance Auditing system efficiently tracks all database accesses and allows auditors to formulate precise audit queries to monitor compliance with privacy and security policies. In this paper, we outline the basic architecture of the HDB solution, discuss the advantages of our approach, and illustrate the features of each component with practical compliance scenarios from the financial services industry.

Enabling Privacy as a Fundamental Construct for Social Networks

The current set of social networking platforms, e.g. Facebook and MySpace, has created a new class of Internet applications called social software. These systems focus on leveraging the real life relationships of people and augment them with the facilities and the richness of the Web. The large number of social applications and the even larger user populations of these social networks are proving that this new class of software is useful and complements modern life. However, social platforms and software are not without drawbacks and significant concerns. One of the most important considerations is the need to allow strong security and privacy protections. In addition, these protections need to be easy to use and apply uniformly across platforms and applications. While most of the leading social platforms have primitives for providing privacy in the platform and the applications, we argue that they are insufficient. In particular, the privacy primitives lack ease of use, are too plentiful, do not fully apply to third party applications, and do not take full advantage of the social graphs that users implicitly build on these platforms. This paper provides a first step in resolving these issues.

Towards improved privacy policy coverage in healthcare using policy refinement

It is now mandatory for healthcare organizations to specify and publish their privacy policies. This has made privacy management initiatives in the healthcare sector increasingly important. However, several recent reports in the public media and the research community about healthcare privacy [1,2] indicate that the use of privacy policies is not necessarily a strong indication of adequate privacy protection for the patient. These observations highlight the fact that the current state of privacy management in healthcare organizations needs improvement. In this paper, we present PRIMA, a PRIvacy Management Architecture, as a first step in addressing this concern. The fundamental idea behind PRIMA is to exploit policy refinement techniques to gradually and seamlessly embed privacy controls into the clinical workflow based on the actual practices of the organization in order to improve the coverage of the privacy policy. PRIMA effectively enables the transition from the current state of perceived to be privacy-preserving systems to actually privacy-preserving systems.

Elevating the Discussion on Security Management: The Data Centric Paradigm

Corporate decision makers have normally been disconnected from the details of the security management infrastructures of their organizations. The management of security resources has traditionally been the domain of a small group of skilled and technically savvy professionals, who report to the executive team. As threats become more prevalent, attackers get smarter and the infrastructure required to secure corporate assets become more complex, the communication gap between the decision makers and the implementers has widened. The risk of misinterpretation of corporate strategy into technical safe controls also increases with the above-mentioned trends. In this paper, we articulate a paradigm for managing enterprise security called the data centric security model (DCSM), which puts IT policy making in the hands of the corporate executives, so that security decisions can be directly executed without the diluting effect of interpretation at different levels of the Infrastructure and with the benefit of seeing direct correlation between business objective and security mechanism. Our articulation of the DCSM vision is a starting point for discussion and provides a rich platform for research into business-driven security management.

Accessing the deep web: when good ideas go bad

Prevailing wisdom assumes that there are well-defined, effective and efficient methods for accessing Deep Web content. Unfortunately, there are a host of technical and non-technical factors that may call this assumption into question. In this paper, we present the findings from work on a software system, which was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The system requires stable and periodic extraction of Deep Web content from a number of online data sources. The insight from the project brings an important issue to the forefront and under-scores the need for further research into access technology for the Deep Web.

Towards a Forensic-Based Service Oriented Architecture Framework for Auditing of Cloud Logs

Cloud computing log digital investigations relate to the investigation of a potential crime using the digital forensic evidence from a virtual machine (VM) host operating system using the hypervisor event logs. In cloud digital log forensics, work on the forensic reconstruction of evidence on VM hosts system is required, but with the heterogeneous complexity involved with an enterprises private cloud not to mention public cloud distributed environments, a possible Web Services-centric approach may be required for such log supported investigations. A data cloud log forensics service oriented architecture (SOA) audit framework for this type of forensic examination needs to allow for the reconstruction of transactions spanning multiple VM hosts, platforms and applications. This paper explores the requirements of a cloud log forensics SOA framework for performing effective digital investigation examinations in these abstract web services environments. This framework will be necessary in order to develop investigative and forensic auditing tools and techniques for use in cloud based log-centric SOAs.

Cloud Log Forensics Metadata Analysis

The increase in the quantity and questionable quality of the forensic information retrieved from the current virtualized data cloud system architectures has made it extremely difficult for law enforcement to resolve criminal activities within these logical domains. This paper poses the question of what kind of information is desired from virtual machine (VM) hosted operating systems (OS) investigated by a cloud forensic examiner. The authors gives an overview of the information that exists on current VM OS by looking at its kernel hypervisor logs and discusses the shortcomings. An examination of the role that the VM kernel hypervisor logs provide as OS metadata in cloud investigations is also presented.