Enabling privacy through transparency

Abstract

Many access control systems, particularly those utilized in hospital environments, exercise optimistic security, because preventing access to information may have undesirable consequences. However, in the wrong hands, these over-broad permissions may result in privacy violations. To circumvent this issue, we have developed Privacy Enabling Transparent Systems (PETS) that makes transparency a key component in systems architectures. PETS is built on open web standards and introduces the Provenance Tracking Network (PTN), an open global trusted network of peer servers, to the traditional web stack.Websites that conform to the architecture communicate information about transactions for any sensitive data items with the PTN. These usage logs are stored in a decentralized manner and can later be queried to check compliance with individual usage restrictions that assert no unauthorized data transfer or usage has taken place. PETS enables data consumers to be transparent with regard to data usages and determine if there has been privacy violations after the fact. We conducted a user study on a healthcare data application built using PETS to see if transparency on access and usage data satisfies expectations of user privacy.

Transparent Personal Data Processing: The Road Ahead

“…Global Log + TTP Global Log + P2P Completeness ---Confidentiality MAC [2,7,14,15], FssAgg [10], PKI [7,10] MAC [1,6,11,12], PKI [20], unlinkability [6,11,12] MAC [15], PKI [16], compound identities [15,21] Correctness ---Immutability cipher chains [2], hash chains [7,15] hash chains [7,15] network of peers [16,19] blockchain [21] Integrity forward integrity [2,7,10,14,15] MAC security proof [2] forward integrity [1,6,11,12] forward integrity [15] Interoperability Performance: When it comes to the processing of the event data, various optimisations such as parallel processing and/or indexing should be used to improve processing efficiency. Scalability: Given the volume of events and policies that will need to be handled, the scalability of event data processing is a major consideration.…”

“…Unfortunately the authors only touch upon the required features and no concrete architecture is proposed. Seneviratne and Kagal [16] build on this idea by describing how a distributed network of peers can be used to store a permanent log of encrypted transactions. The replication of log entries at each peer optimises both redundancy and availability.…”

“…As a first step towards realising this goal, in this position paper, we examine the suitability of existing logging and transparency mechanisms as the basis for developing such a system. There exists a variety of logging mechanisms that either represent events in local logs [2,7,10,14,15], in global logs entrusted to one or more third parties [1,6,11,12], or distribute event logging across a number of peers [16,19,21]. Ideally it should be possible to use some of these logging mechanisms together with access/usage policies in order to automatically verify compliance of existing business processes with the GDPR.…”

Can Transparency Enhancing Tools Support Patient’s Accessing Electronic Health Records?

“…For instance, medical data can have any link with patients' identification removed before being available for research. Privacy is usually obtained by applying Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs) [11][12][13][14]. PETs alone do not ensure transparency, again because they are not designed to address regulation requirements stating that users must be informed.…”

“…Provenance Tracker Network [14] PTN This is a decentralized network of peer servers that maintain the usage logs. No single entity can exercise ownership over the entire collection of log records.…”