A Model for Reasoning About the Privacy Impact of Composite Service Execution in Pervasive Computing

Abstract

Service composition is a fundamental feature of pervasive computing middleware. It enables users to leverage available computing power by using existing services as building blocks for creating new composite services. In open and dynamic environments, service composition must be flexible enough to admit realization by different executable workflows that have similar functionalities but that present different partitions of tasks among available services. This flexibility, however, raises new privacy issues e.g., a single service performing all tasks of a workflow has access to more data than different services executing parts of the workflow.In this paper we propose a model that enables users to reason about the impact on privacy of executing a composite service. The model is based on an extension of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps, and considers the impact of the composition as a whole according to the partition of tasks. We introduce our extension called Fuzzy Cognitive Maps with Causality Feedback, describe how they can be used to model the relationship among different personal data and the privacy impact of their disclosure, and give an example of how the model can be applied to a composition scenario.

AppCivist - A Service-Oriented Software Platform for Socially Sustainable Activism

“…With the advent of online social networking (OSN), the use of sites such as Facebook and Twitter has gained momentum among activists, which leverage their abilities to rapidly reach out and discuss with a potentially large community of supporters. However, the two major concerns in using OSNs are i) their silo-like nature severely restricts the inclusiveness of the movement, often excluding those who are either too poor to access the internet regularly, or do not like the privacy implications of these OSNs; and ii) the limits on extensibility of the core platform makes it very difficult to customize for the functions highlighted in Section I. Content-management Systems: The next level of online tools available to activists are web-based user-and contentmanagement systems that are used by organizations; foremost among those are Google Apps for Non Profits 5 and Wordpress 6 . Each of them comes with a suite of essential services, either provided as-a-service (in the case of Google Apps) or for self-hosting (in the case of Wordpress), which includes user and content management.…”

“…This component takes as input an "assembly" created by the activist (much like a BPMN specification in the enterprise context), in addition to the activists requirements regarding cost, anonymity, etc., and consults the AppCivist Registry to select the appropriate services that together can provide the needed composite functionality while satisfying the non-functional constraints. Note that as discussed in works such as [6], the problem of guaranteeing adequate levels of overall privacy while composing services is not completely solved.…”