Data misuses and data confidentiality breaches may have severe consequences
on individual privacy, businesses, and national security. Even though
data privacy and confidentiality have been widely investigated, we
today face new challenges because of new data management applications,
new software paradigms, new distributed collaborative applications,
and requirements to achieve high assurance data sharing processes.
In what follows, I elaborate on some challenges.
1) Risk-based Access Control
Today the need for sharing information within the same organization
and across organizations is a pressing need. However, sharing data
very often incurs risks. Therefore, at the end one has to tradeoff
the benefits and the risks of data sharing. Quantifying those benefits
and risks is a major challenge. It involves assessing the value of
data, the potential damage that may arise if data is improperly disclosed,
the benefit deriving from sharing the data for the party owning the
data and the party receiving the data. Also one needs to determine
in which form data is to be released, for example data can be anonymized
or summarized, depending on the data value and the foreseen usage
of the data. A party that has to decide about releasing some data
to other parties may need to acquire data about these parties in order
to make such decision. Policy languages are needed allowing a party
to specify its own conditions and requirements for sharing its own
data. Confidentiality-preserving protocols are required to manage
such data and to verify policy conditions against such data.
2) Assured Information Sharing
Data sharing may occur today in a large variety of forms, such as
data shipping, (private) information retrieval, data integration in
common repositories, publish-subscribe systems. For each such data
sharing approaches, we need to understand which the best data confidentiality
techniques are. Fine-grained access control is also relevant here.
We need to understand which assurance level can be provided about
the usage of data when released to other parties. Solutions are both
technical and organizational. When dealing with collaborative applications,
these applications need to come up with a common access control policy;
we thus need approaches for fine-grained policy integration. A party
acquiring some data may also want assurance on the
origin of the received data and to know the policies under which such
data had been disclosed. Those are important for data accountability.
A party releasing some data may want to be notified by the receiving
party about the use of these data and transfer to third party. However,
such
information may be business-confidential for the receiving party and
therefore negotiation protocols must be in place.
3) Data Confidentiality in Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA)
Modern middleware and applications will increasingly rely on SOA.
We need to understand the implication on data confidentially (and
security more in general) of such fragmented and highly dynamic architectures.
Another direction is to use SOA to support data confidentiality (and
security). We need to understand whether it is possible to provide
services for data confidentiality that could be invoked by applications
characterized by complex access control requirements.
4) Data Confidentiality and Privacy Requirements for Novel Data Management
Systems and Applications
There are several specialized data management systems for which confidentiality
has not been much investigated. Notable examples include streaming
database systems, and geographical information systems. We need to
identify access control and privacy requirements for these
systems. We see also the emergence of the so-called Web 2.0 that embraces
new collaborative applications and also indicates a new "social"
approach to generating and distributing Web content, characterized
by open communication, decentralization of authority, and freedom
to share and re-use. Implicit and explicit in many Web 2.0 applications
are social networks, through which users share and filter content,
collaborate, seek information, and interact socially on the Web. We
need to understand the privacy and confidentiality requirements of
these new exciting applications.