Privacy Engineering Book

Privacy Engineering

A dataflow and ontological approach

An essential companion book for those of us who have to model systems from small mobile apps to large, cloudified BigData system from the perspective of privacy and personal data handling.

Available via Amazon (US, UK and all Amazon worldwide sites), CreateSpace and selected bookstores such as Barnes and Noble. Kindle version available, also with Kindle Match Book enabling you to the Kindle version for just 2.99USD when purchasing the paperback.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction
2. Case Study
3. Privacy Engineering Process Structure
4. Data Flow Modelling
5. Security and Information Classifications
6. Additional Classification Structures
7. Requirements
8. Risk and Assessments
9. Notice and Consent
10. Privacy Enhancing Techniques
11. Auditing and Inspections
12. Developing a Privacy Programme

Information privacy is the major defining issue of today's Internet enabled World. To construct information systems from small mobile 'apps' to huge, heterogeneous, cloudified systems requires merging together skills from software engineering, legal, security and many other disciplines - including some outside of these fields! 

Only through properly modelling the system under development can we full appreciate the complexity of where personal data and information flows; and more importantly, effectively communicate this. This book presents an approach based upon data flow modelling, coupled with standardised terminological frameworks, classifications and ontologies to properly annotate and describe the flow of information into, out of and across these systems. 

Also provided are structures and frameworks for the engineering process, requirements and audits; and even the privacy programme itself, but takes a pragmatic approach and encourages using and modifying the tools and techniques presented as the local context and needs require.

Published July 2014

ISBN-13: 978-1497569713
ISBN-10: 1497569710
264 Pages, B/W on White Paper

A Privacy Engineer's Bookshelf

There's a huge amount of material about privacy, software engineering etc already existing. So what should every privacy engineer have at minimum on his or her bookshelf? Here are my suggestions (I might be biased in some cases) which I think everyone working privacy should know about.

• Privacy Engineering: A Data Flow and Ontological Approach, Oliver 
• The Privacy Engineer's Manifesto, Dennedy, Fox, Finneran 
• Understanding Privacy, Solove 
• Privacy in Context, Nissenbaum 
• Applied Cryptograpy, Schneier

The reasoning behind the above is that entering the privacy engineering field one needs a good cross section and balance of understanding the legal and ethical foundations of privacy (Nissenbaum, Solove) through the software engineering process (Dennedy et al) to the actual task of modelling and analysing the system (Oliver). Scheneier's book is included to provide a good perspective on the major protection technology of encryption.

Of course this does not preclude other material nor a thorough search through the privacy literature, conferences and academic publications.

To be a privacy engineer really does mean engineering and specifically system and software engineering skills.

Wikileaks, NSA and a crytpographic cat and mouse game

So we know that certain government agencies are collecting data and we also know that Wikileaks has at least 400Gb of encrypted data (aka. "insurance") now in the public domain.

It is encrypted and no-one knows what's there...right?

Schneier posted on his blog an article about the upcomming cryptopocalypse about an presentation from the Black Hat conference entitled The Factoring Dead:Preparing for the Cryptopocalypse.

Given that we are fairly confident that the NSA has an enormous amount of computing power available to it, but even then probably not enough for a brute force attack on the Wikileak's encrypted data by a few orders of magnitude, they do have some pretty competent mathematicians working in that field and a vast amount of data including a lot of unencrypted originals.

Now, as mathematics starts chipping away as the encryption algorithms themselves the amount of computation and time to decrypt without a key comes dramatically down (it might just take a few billions of years now).

What helps in these scenarios is if you have some knowledge about what the encrypted data contains and its encryption method. If the Wikileaks file contains what it is supposed to contain (whatever that is, but it probably implicates the USA) then we have a head-start towards the decryption. This isn't too far from what Alan Turing and the Bletchley code breakers did.

Furthermore, rarely in the past have we have huge amounts of data to work with...encryption algorithms generate data with extremely high entropy. The point now is that is there enough entropy in 400Gb of encrypted data? Do patterns start emerging at some point? Admittedly even 400Gb is not considered a large amount of data these days.

Furthermore the encryption algorithm used is one approved by the NSA. What if the NSA start matching already encrypted documents they hold against the Wikileaks data? Is there a weakness in the keys? Are there patterns in the encrypted data that are independent of the keys being used? Then there's the interesting idea of a blackdoor in the algorithm too.

So, (tin foil hats on please), one of the things that Wikileaks is then looking forward is accidental disclosure of some information in that release. This might suggest that either NSA has succesfulyl decrypted the data. I'm sure that the NSA aren't that stupid to tell us that but governments are large things and even despite apparently good security practices breaches happen either deliberately or accidentally.

From a game theoretic point of view the best I can come up with at the moment is that any release of information by the NSA will reveal subtle hints about what they can and can not do with regards to their knowledge of encryption algorithms.

Shares in popcorn and publishers of books on game theory just went through the roof. Ultimately it might just be that physics, mathematics and plain old information theory has the last laugh...

Excellent description on AES encryption

http://www.moserware.com/2009/09/stick-figure-guide-to-advanced.html