Temporal Mode-Checking for Runtime Monitoring of Privacy Policies

Abstract

Abstract. Fragments of first-order temporal logic are useful for representing many practical privacy and security policies. Past work has proposed two strategies for checking event trace (audit log) compliance with policies: online monitoring and offline audit. Although online monitoring is space-and time-efficient, existing techniques insist that satisfying instances of all subformulas of the policy be amenable to caching, which limits expressiveness when some subformulas have infinite support. In contrast, offline audit is brute force and can handle more policies but is not as efficient. This paper proposes a new online monitoring algorithm that caches satisfying instances when it can, and falls back to the brute force search when it cannot. Our key technical insight is a new flow-and time-sensitive static check of variable groundedness, called the temporal mode check, which determines subformulas for which such caching is feasible and those for which it is not and, hence, guides our algorithm. We prove the correctness of our algorithm and evaluate its performance over synthetic traces and realistic policies.

Data Capsule: A New Paradigm for Automatic Compliance with Data Privacy Regulations

“…Going beyond formalism of privacy regulations, recent research also explores techniques to enforce these formalised privacy regulations in real-world data processing systems. Chowdhury et al [31] propose to use temporal model-checking for run-time monitoring of privacy policies. While Chowdhury demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach in online monitoring of privacy policies, it does not provide the capability of static analysis to decide if a analytic program satisfies a privacy policy and can only report privacy violation after it happens.…”

Run-Time Monitoring of Data-Handling Violations

“…The paper proves correctness, termination, time and space complexity results of reduce. Chowdhury et al [8] outlines an approach to temporal mode-checking for run-time monitoring of privacy policies by checking online event trace compliance from caching satisfying instances when it can and fall back to brute force checking when it cannot.…”

The VACCINE Framework for Building DLP Systems

“…It is used to describe contextual informational norms, to detect infractions of these norms, and in approaches to accountability and enforcement [13,44]. Much of the prior work in this space has focused on sophisticated formal logics for describing CI norms that involve complex temporal properties of sequences of information flows such as those involved in HIPAA [45][46][47][48]. However, these logics are typically too expressive to serve as a suitable foundation for tools that mechanize reasoning about privacy norms in real-world systems.…”