Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Eddy, a formal language for specifying and analyzing data flow specifications for conflicting privacy requirements

  • RE2013
  • Published:
Requirements Engineering Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Increasingly, companies use multi-source data to operate new information systems, such as social networking, e-commerce, and location-based services. These systems leverage complex, multi-stakeholder data supply chains in which each stakeholder (e.g., users, developers, companies, and government) must manage privacy and security requirements that cover their practices. US regulator and European regulator expect companies to ensure consistency between their privacy policies and their data practices, including restrictions on what data may be collected, how it may be used, to whom it may be transferred, and for what purposes. To help developers check consistency, we identified a strict subset of commonly found privacy requirements and we developed a methodology to map these requirements from natural language text to a formal language in description logic, called Eddy. Using this language, developers can detect conflicting privacy requirements within a policy and enable the tracing of data flows within these policies. We derived our methodology from an exploratory case study of the Facebook platform policy and an extended case study using privacy policies from Zynga and AOL Advertising. In this paper, we report results from multiple analysts in a literal replication study, which includes a refined methodology and set of heuristics that we used to extract privacy requirements from policy texts. In addition to providing the method, we report results from performing automated conflict detection within the Facebook, Zynga, and AOL privacy specifications, and results from a computer simulation that demonstrates the scalability of our formal language toolset to specifications of reasonable size.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. For the purposes of comparison to other approaches, we call our privacy requirements specification language “Eddy” for the circular movement of water that runs counter to the main current, a connotation that appears appropriate when describing data flows in multi-tier systems where the flow of data may run counter to conflicting privacy requirements.

References

  1. Anderson A (2006) A comparison of two privacy policy languages: EPAL and XACML. ACM workshop on secure web services, pp 53–60

  2. Ashley P, Hada S, Karjoth G, Schunter M (2002) E-P3P privacy policies and privacy authorization. In: Proceedings of the ACM workshop on privacy in the electronic society, pp 103–109

  3. Antón AI, Earp JB, He Q, Stufflebeam W, Bolchini D, Jensen C (2004) Financial privacy policies and the need for standardization. IEEE Secur Priv 2(2):36–45

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Antón AI, Earp JB (2004) A requirements taxonomy for reducing web site privacy vulnerabilities. Requir Eng J 9(3):169–185

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Aucher G, Boella G, van der Torre L (2010) Privacy policies with modal logic: a dynamic turn. In: Lecture Notes on Computer Science, vol 6181, pp 196–213

  6. Baader F, Calvenese D, McGuiness D (eds) (2003) The description logic handbook: theory, implementation and applications. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  7. Barth A, Datta A, Mitchell JC, Nissenbaum H (2006) Privacy and contextual integrity: framework and applications. In: IEEE symposium on security and privacy, pp 184–198

  8. Breaux TD, Antón AI (2005) Analyzing goal semantics for rights, permissions, and obligations. In: IEEE international requirements engineering conference, Paris, France, pp 177–186

  9. Breaux TD, Antón AI (2008) Analyzing regulatory rules for privacy and security requirements. IEEE Trans Softw Eng 34(1):5–20

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Breaux TD, Antón AI, Doyle J (2009) Semantic parameterization: a conceptual modeling process for domain descriptions. ACM Trans Softw Eng Method 18(2) (article 5)

  11. Breaux TD, Vail MW, Antón AI (2006) Towards regulatory compliance: extracting rights and obligations to align requirements with regulations. In: IEEE requirements engineering conference, pp 49–58

  12. Breaux TD, Baumer DL (2011) Legally ‘reasonable’ security requirements: a 10-year FTC retrospective. Comput Secur 30(4):178–193

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Breaux TD, Rao A (2013) Formal analysis of privacy requirements specifications for multi-tier applications. In: IEEE 21st international requirements engineering conference (to appear)

  14. Bradshaw J, Uszok A, Jeffers R, Suri N, Hayes P, Burstein M, Acquisti A, Benyo B, Breedy M, Carvalho M, Diller D, Johnson M, Kulkarni S, Lott J, Sierhuis M, van Hoof R (2003) Representation and reasoning for DAML-based policy and domain services in KAoS and Nomads. In: 2nd International joint conference on autonomous agents and multi agent systems

  15. Cranor L et al (2006) Platform for privacy preferences (P3P) specification. W3C working group note

  16. Cohen J (1968) Weighted kappa: nominal scale agreement with provision for scaled disagreement or partial credit. Psychol Bull 70(4):213–220

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Dean J, Ghemawat S (2004) MapReduce: simplified data processing on large clusters. In: 6th Symposium on operating system design and implementation

  18. DeYoung H, Garg D, Jia L, Kaynar D, Datta A (2010) Experiences in the logical specification of the HIPAA and GLBA privacy laws. In: ACM workshop on privacy in the electronic society, pp 73–82

  19. Farrell CB (2011) FTC charges deceptive privacy practices in Google’s rollout of its buzz social network. In: U.S. Federal Trade Commission News Release, March 30, 2011

  20. Hanson C, Berners-Lee T, Kagal L, Sussman GJ, Weitzner D (2007) Data-purpose algebra: modeling data usage policies. In: 8th IEEE workshop on policies for distributed systems and networks, pp 173–177

  21. Horty JF (1993) Deontic logic as founded in non-monotonic logic. Ann Math Artif Intell 9:69–91

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  22. Kagal L (2004) A policy-based approach to governing autonomous behavior in distributed environments. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

  23. Kahmer M, Gilliot M, Muller G (2008) Automating privacy compliance with ExPDT. In: 10th IEEE conference on e-commerce technology, pp 87–94

  24. Krippendorff K (2004) Content analysis: an introduction to its methodology. Sage, Thousand Oaks

    Google Scholar 

  25. Leon PG, Cranor LF, McDonald AM, McGuire R (2010) Token attempt: the misrepresentation of website privacy policies through the misuse of p3p compact policy tokens. In: 9th Workshop on privacy in the electronic society, pp 93–104

  26. Lin HT, Sirin E (2008) Pellint—a performance lint tool for pellet. In: International workshop on OWL: experiences and directions (OWL-ED 2008)

  27. Lupu E, Sloman M, Dulay N, Damianou N (2000) Ponder: realizing enterprise viewpoint concepts. In: 4th International conference on enterprise distributed object computing, Japan, pp 66–75

  28. Lutz C, Wolter F, Zakharyashev M (2008) Temporal description logics: a survey. In: 15th IEEE international symposium on temporal representation and reasoning, pp 3–14

  29. Moses T (ed) (2005) eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML), v.2.0, OASIS Standard

  30. May MJ (2008) Privacy APIs: formal models for analyzing legal and privacy requirements. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Pennsylvania

  31. Nissenbaum H (2004) Privacy as contextual integrity. Wash Law Rev 791:119–158

    Google Scholar 

  32. Powers C, Schunter M (2003) Enterprise policy authorization language, version 1.2. W3C Member Submission

  33. Park J, Sandhu R (2004) The UCONABC usage control model. ACM Trans Inf Syst Secur 7(1):128–174

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Steel E, Fowler GA (2010) Facebook in privacy breach. Wall Street J. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304772804575558484075236968

  35. Sweeney Latanya (2002) k-Anonymity: a model for protecting privacy. Int J Uncertain Fuzziness Knowl Based Syst 10(5):557–570

    Article  MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  36. Tonti G, Bradshaw JM, Jeffers R, Montanari R, Suri N, Uszok A (2003) Semantic web languages for policy representation and reasoning: a comparison of KAoS, Rei, and Ponder. LNCS 2870:419–437

    Google Scholar 

  37. Uszok A, Bradshaw JM, Lott J, Breedy M, Bunch L (2008) New developments in ontology-based policy management: increasing the practicality and comprehensiveness of KAoS. In: IEEE workshop on policies for distributed systems and networks, pp 145–152

  38. Wan F, Singh MP (2005) Formalizing and achieving multiparty agreements via commitments. In: 4th international joint conference on autonomous agents multiagent systems, pp. 770–777

  39. Yin RK (2009) Case study research, 4th edn. In: Applied social research methods series, v.5. Sage Publications

  40. Yu T, Li N, Antón AI (2004) A formal semantics for P3P. ACM workshop on secure web services, pp 1–8

  41. Young J (2011) Commitment analysis to operationalize software requirements from privacy policies. Requir Eng J 16:33–46

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

We thank Dave Gordon and Darya Kurilova for their earlier feedback and the Requirements Engineering Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. This work was supported by NSF Award #1330596 and ONR Award #N00244-12-1-0014.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Software Research, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Travis D. Breaux, Hanan Hibshi & Ashwini Rao

Authors
  1. Travis D. Breaux
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Hanan Hibshi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Ashwini Rao
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Travis D. Breaux.

Appendix

Appendix

The context-free grammar for the privacy requirements specification language, called Eddy, is presented here in the Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF):

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Breaux, T.D., Hibshi, H. & Rao, A. Eddy, a formal language for specifying and analyzing data flow specifications for conflicting privacy requirements. Requirements Eng 19, 281–307 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-013-0190-7

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-013-0190-7

Keywords

Search

Navigation