CFP: TrustCom 2015

The 14th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (IEEE TrustCom-15)

Helsinki, Finland, 20-22 August, 2015

With the rapid development and increasing complexity of computer systems and communication networks, user requirements for trust, security and privacy are becoming more and more demanding. Therefore, there is a grand challenge that traditional security technologies and measures may not meet user requirements in open, dynamic, heterogeneous, mobile, wireless, and distributed computing environments. As a result, we need to build systems and networks in which various applications allow users to enjoy more comprehensive services while preserving trust, security and privacy at the same time. As useful and innovative technologies, trusted computing and communications are attracting researchers with more and more attention.

The 14th IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications (IEEE TrustCom-15) will be held in Helsinki, Finland on 20-22 August 2015. The conference aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners in the world working on trusted computing and communications, with regard to trust, security, privacy, reliability, dependability, survivability, availability, and fault tolerance aspects of computer systems and networks, and providing a forum to present and discuss emerging ideas and trends in this highly challenging research field.

Accepted and presented papers will be included in the IEEE CPS Proceedings.
Distinguished papers presented at the conference, after further revision, will be recommended to high quality international journals.

A Definition of PII and Personal Data

There's been an interesting discussion on Twitter about the terms PII and "personal data", classification of information and metrics.

Personally I think the terms "PII" and "personal data" are too broadly applied. Their definitions are poor at best; when did you last see a formal definition of these terms? Indeed classifying a data set as PII only comes about from the types of data inside that data set and by measuring the amount of identifiability of that set.

There now exists two problems in that a classification system underneath that of PII isn't well established in normal terminology. Secondly metrics for information content are very much defined in terms of information entropy.

Providing these underlying classifications is critical to better comprehending the data that we are dealing with. For example, consider the following diagram:

Given any set of data, each field can be mapped into one or more of the seven broad categories on the left - If we wanted we could create much more sophisticated ontologies to express this. Within each of these we can specialise more and this is somewhat represented as we move horizontally across the diagram.

Avoiding information entropy as much as possible, we can and have derived some form of metric to at least assess the risk of data being held or processed. A high 'score' means high risk and a high degree of reidentification is possible, while a low score the opposite - though not necessarily meaning that there is no risk. Each of the categories could be further weighted such as using location is twice as risky as financial data.

There could be and are some interesting relationships between the categories, for example, identifiers such as machine addresses (IPs) can be mapped into personal identifiers and locations - depending upon the use case.

I'm not going to go into a full formalisation of the function to calculate this, but a simple function which takes in a data set's fields and produces a value, say in the range 0 to 5 to state the risk of the data set might suffice. A second function to map that value to a set of requirements to handle that risk is the needed.

What about PII?  Well, to really establish this we should go into the contents of the data and the context in which that data exists. Another, rather brutal way, is to draw a boundary line across the above diagram such that things on the right-hand-side are potentially PII and those on the left not. This might then become a useful weighting metric, that if anything appears to the right of this line then the whole data set gets tagged with being potentially PII. I guess you could also become quite clever in using this division line to normalise the risk scoring across the various information classifications.

In summary, we can therefore give the term PII (or personal data) a definition in terms of what a data set contains rather than using it as a catch-all classification. This allows us then to have a proper discussion about risk and requirements.

References

Ian Oliver. Privacy Engineering: A Data Flow and Ontological Approach. ISBN 978-1497569713

First International Workshop on Privacy Engineering (IWPE'15)

CFP:

First International Workshop on Privacy Engineering

(IWPE'15)

http://ieee-security.org/TC/SPW2015/IWPE/

http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2015

21 May 2015 - The Fairmont, San Jose, CA 

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IMPORTANT DATES:
Deadline of paper submission:  23 January, 2015
Notification of acceptance:    16 February, 2015 
Accepted Paper camera ready:   3 March, 2015  

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We are pleased to invite you to participate in the premier annual event of the International Workshop on Privacy Engineering (IWPE'15).

Ongoing news reports regarding global surveillance programs, massive personal data breaches in corporate databases, and notorious examples of personal tragedies due to privacy violations have intensified societal demands for privacy-friendly systems. In response, current legislative and standardization processes worldwide aim to strengthen individual’s privacy by introducing legal and organizational frameworks that personal data collectors and processors must follow.

However, in practice, these initiatives alone are not enough to guarantee that organizations and software developers will be able to identify and adopt appropriate privacy engineering techniques in their daily practices. Even if so, it is difficult to systematically evaluate whether the systems they develop using such techniques comply with legal frameworks, provide necessary technical assurances, and fulfill users’ privacy requirements. It is evident that research is needed in developing techniques that can aid the translation of legal and normative concepts, as well as user expectations into systems requirements. Furthermore, methods that can support organizations and engineers in developing (socio-)technical systems that address these requirements is of increasing value to respond to the existing societal challenges associated with privacy.

In this context, privacy engineering research is emerging as an important topic. Engineers are increasingly expected to build and maintain privacy-preserving and data-protection compliant systems in different ICT domains such as health, energy, transportation, social computing, law enforcement, public services; based on different infrastructures such as cloud, grid, or mobile computing and architectures. While there is a consensus on the benefits of an engineering approach to privacy, concrete proposals for processes, models, methodologies, techniques and tools that support engineers and organizations in this endeavor are few and in need of immediate attention.

To cover this gap, the topics of the International Workshop on Privacy Engineering (IWPE'15) focus on all the aspects surrounding privacy engineering, ranging from its theoretical foundations, engineering approaches, and support infrastructures, to its practical application in projects of different scale. Specifically, we are seeking the following kinds of papers: (1) technical solution papers that illustrate a novel formalism, method or other research finding with preliminary evaluation; (2) experience and practice papers that describe a case study, challenge or lessons learned from in a specific domain; (3) early evaluations of tools and other infrastructure that support engineering tasks in privacy requirements, design, implementation, testing, etc.; (4) interdisciplinary studies or critical reviews of existing privacy engineering concepts, methods and frameworks; or (5) vision papers that take a clear position informed by evidence based on a thorough literature review.

IWPE’15 welcomes papers that focus on novel solutions on the recent developments in the general area of privacy engineering. Topics of interests include, but are not limited to:

• Integration of law and policy compliance into the development process
• Privacy impact assessment
• Privacy risk management models
• Privacy breach recovery Methods
• Technical standards, heuristics and best practices for privacy engineering
• Privacy engineering in technical standards
• Privacy requirements elicitation and analysis methods
• User privacy and data protection requirements
• Management of privacy requirements with other system requirements
• Privacy requirements operationalization
• Privacy engineering strategies and design patterns
• Privacy architectures
• Privacy engineering and databases
• Privacy engineering in the context of interaction design and usability
• Privacy testing and evaluation methods
• Validation and verification of privacy requirements
• Engineering Privacy Enhancing Technologies
• Models and approaches for the verification of privacy properties
• Tools supporting privacy engineering
• Teaching and training privacy engineering
• Adaptations of privacy engineering into specific software development processes
• Pilots and real-world applications
• Privacy engineering and accountability
• Organizational, legal, political and economic aspects of privacy engineering

This topic list is not meant to be exhaustive; since IWPE'15 is interested in all aspects of privacy engineering. However, papers without a clear application to privacy engineering will be considered out of scope and may be rejected without full review.

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PAPER FORMAT & SUBMISSION

We solicit unpublished short position papers (up to 4 pages) and long papers reporting technical, research or industry experience (up to 8 pages) on all dimensions of the privacy engineering domain. Each paper, written in English, must follow IEEE Proceedings format. Submission of a paper should be regarded as an undertaking that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will attend the workshop to present the paper. All papers must be submitted via EasyChair at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iwpe15

All IWPE'15 Papers will be published in IEEE eXplore, which is indexed by EI Engineering Index, ISI Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI-S), Scopus etc.

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If you have any questions regarding IWPE'15, please contact:

Jose M. del Alamo (jm.delalamo@upm.es)
Norman Sadeh (sadeh@cs.cmu.edu)
Seda Gurses (seda@nyu.edu)
Dawn Jutla (dawn.jutla@smu.ca)

Spam and Category Theory

A long time ago I came across an interesting article on the n-Category Cafe about a presentation by Fernando Zalamea on Sheaf Logic and Philosophical Synthesis.

For some reason over the past week this blog has been inundated with requests to the page I wrote on this - basically a reminder for myself to read up on this work.

I happy with a few tens of hits to this blog per day, but yesterday's 135 hits to that one page all came from the home of philosophy: France. So a merci to those who found a way to this blog and maybe onto Zalamea's original presentation - glad to be of assistance.

Part of me is delighted by the collective interest in this topic, while part of me suspects that this is spam.

Hmmmm....