Privacy Engine for Context-Aware Enterprise Application Services

• Main Authors: BLOUNT, Marion, DAVIS, John, EBLING, Maria, JEROME, William, LEIBA, Barry, LIU, Xuan, MISRA, Archan
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2008
• Subjects: Access control schemes; Context constraints; Context-aware; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/672; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/1671/viewcontent/Privacy_Engine_2008_av.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Satisfying the varied privacy preferences of individuals, while exposing context data to authorized applications and individuals, remains a major challenge for context-aware computing. This paper describes our experiences in building a middleware component, the context privacy engine (CPE), that enforces a role-based, context-dependent privacy model for enterprise domains. While fundamentally an ACL-based access control scheme, CPE extends the traditional ACL mechanism with usage control and context constraints. This paper focuses on discussing issues related to managing and evaluating context-dependent privacy policies. Extensive experimental studies with a production-grade implementation and real-life context sources demonstrate that the CPE can support a large number of concurrent requests. The experiments also show valuable insight on how context-retrieval can affect the privacy evaluation process.