The management of privacy and personal information within multi-cultural domain such as clouds and other universal collaborative systems requires intrinsic compliance-checking and assurance modules in order to increase social trust and acceptance. Focusing mainly on medical domains, this issue is particularly important due to the sensitivity of health related data in international data protection law. The use of ontologies and semantic technologies can provide relatively easy interpretation of legislation at run time, and can allow the logging of data access events to serve for future audits. However, the enforcement of semantic web rules (SWRL rules) on complex and heterogeneous architectures is expensive and might present runtime overheads. We believe a mapping of our semantic web privacy policies to a standard access control language such as XACML would be a useful alternative. A translation to XACML, would allow the integration of these policies with existing security and privacy policies being adopted on clouds environments. This paper describes a mathematical formalism for mapping SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) privacy rules to XACML policies and also explains the underline implementation requirements of this formalism.

We provide an approach for real-time analysis of ongoing events in a controlled network. We propose ReasONets, i.e. Reasoning on Networks, a distributed and lightweight system, able to process and reason about anomalies and incidents observed in closed net- works. To the best of our knowledge this is the first system combining detections and classification of network events with real-time reasoning. Our demo will show a running prototype of the ReasONets, demonstrating the power and accuracy of the reasoning process in presence of incidents of various nature.

This paper introduces and discusses a data management solution to provide accountability within the cloud as well as addressing privacy issues. The central idea is as follows: Customers allow cloud (service) providers to have access to specific data based on agreed policies and by forcing interactions with interchangeable independent third parties called Trust Authorities. The access to data can be as fine-grained as necessary, based on policy definitions, underlying encryption mechanisms (supporting the stickiness of policies to the data) and a related key management approach that allows (sets of) data attribute(s) to be encrypted specifically based on the policy. Access to data is mediated by a Trust Authority that checks for compliance to policies in order to release decryption keys. By these means users can be provided with fine-grained control over access and usage of their data within the cloud, even in public cloud models.

Federated identity management is an emerging paradigm that is rightly getting a lot of standardization and research attention. One aspect that is not receiving enough attention is assurance. Given the challenges enterprises faced trying to demonstrate appropriate control of their internal and monol ithic identity management systems, the problem of how to provide assurance to multiple stakeholders that controls, operations and technologies that cut across organisational boundaries, are appropriately mitigating risk, looks daunting. The paper provides an exposition of the assurance process, how it applies to identity management and particularly to federated identity management. Our contribution is to show technology can be used to overcome many of trust, transparency and information reconciliation problems. Specifically we show how declarative assurance models can orchestrate and automate much of the assurance work, how certain enforcement technologies can radically improve identity assurance, and how an assurance framework can provide a basis for judging the assurance value of security technologies.

The integration of different European medical systems by means of grid technologies will continue to be challenging if technology does not intervene to enhance interoperability between national regulatory frameworks on data protection. Achieving compliance in European healthgrid domains is crucial but challenging because of the diversity and complexity of Member State legislation across Europe. Lack of automation and inconsistency of processes across healthcare organizations increase the complexity of the compliance task. In the absence of automation, the compliance task entails human intervention. In this paper we present an approach to automate privacy requirements for the sharing of patient data between Member States across Europe in a healthgrid domain and ensure its enforcement internally and within external domains where the data might travel. This approach is based on the semantic modelling of privacy obligations that are of legal, ethical or cultural nature. Our model reflects both similarities and conflicts, if any, between the different Member States. This will allow us to reason on the safeguards a data controller should demand from an organization belonging to another Member State before disclosing medical data to them. The system will also generate the relevant set of policies to be enforced at the process level of the grid to ensure privacy compliance before allowing access to the data.

It is hard for security practitioners and decision-makers to know what level of protection they are getting from their investments in security, especially when they have invested in a number of technologies and processes which interact and combine together. It is even harder to estimate how well these investments can be expected to protect their organizations in the future as security policies, regulations and the threat environment are constantly changing. In this paper we propose that for measuring the effectiveness of security processes in large organizations, a greater emphasis needs to be put on process-based metrics, in contrast to the more commonly used symptomatic lagging indicators. We show, by means of two case studies, how these process-based metrics can be combined with executable, predictive models, based on a sound mathematical foundation, to both assess organizations' security processes under current conditions and predict how well they are likely to perform in potential future scenarios, which may include changes in working practices, policies or threat levels, or new investments in security. We present two case studies, in the areas of vulnerability threat management, and identity and access management, as significant examples to illustrate how this modeling and simulation-based approach can be used to provide a rich picture of how well existing security processes are protecting the organization and to answer "what-if" questions, such as exploring the effects of a change in security policy or an investment in new security technology. Our approach enables the organization to apply the metrics that are most relevant to its business, and provide a comprehensive view that shows the benefits and losses to the different stakeholders.

People are usually asked by enterprises to disclose their personal information to access web services and engage in business interactions. Enterprises need this information to enable their business processes. This is unlikely to change, at least in the foreseeable future. When collecting personal d ata, enterprises must satisfy privacy laws and policies along with addressing people's expectations on how their data should be handled. Currently much is done by means of manual processes, in particular in terms of privacy enforcement: these processes are prone to mistakes and hard to comply with. Automation can help enterprises to deal with these privacy management issues, in particular the enforcement of privacy policies on collected personal data. Enterprises have already been investing in identity management solutions: they require that approaches to automate privacy management should keep into account and leverage these solutions. This paper discusses our research and development work to automate the enforcement of privacy policies in enterprises. Our model of privacy policy enforcement is introduced along with the technical details of a related prototype, integrated (as a proof of concept) with HP Select Access, a state-of-the-art identity management solution. This technology is currently under productisation. We discuss our current results and next steps.

People are usually asked by enterprises and other organizations to disclose their personal information to access web services and engage in business interactions. Enterprises need this information to enable their business processes. This is unlikely to change, at least in the foreseeable future. When collecting personal data, enterprises must satisfy privacy laws and policies along with addressing people's expectations on how their data should be handled. Currently much is done by means of manual processes, in particular in terms of privacy enforcement: these processes are prone to mistakes and hard to comply with. Automation can help enterprises to deal with these privacy management issues, in particular the enforcement of privacy policies on collected personal data. Enterprises have already been investing in identity management solutions: they require that approaches to automate privacy management should keep into account and leverage these solutions. This paper discusses our research and development work to automate the enforcement of privacy policies in enterprises. Our model of privacy policy enforcement is introduced along with the technical details of a related prototype, integrated (as a proof of concept) with HP Select Access, a state-of-the-art identity management solution. This technology is currently under productisation. We discuss our current results and next steps.

In this paper we describe a system for allocating computational resources to distributed applications and services (within distributed data centres and utility computing systems) in order to perform operations on personal or confidential data in a way that is compliant with associated privacy policies. Relevant privacy policies are selected on the fly, based on related meta-policies, depending on contextual information (potentially including location) and properties of the resources. One or more Trusted Privacy Services are involved to mediate the access to the data, based on the satisfaction of pertinent policies. Resources might be equipped with trusted computing components (e.g. Trusted Platform Modules []) to provide higher assurance and trust about the contextual statements or properties of these resources (such as their location, their status and integrity, etc.).

Digital information is increasingly more and more important to enable interactions and transactions on the Internet. On the other hand, leakages of sensitive information can have harmful effects for people, enterprises and governments.This paper focuses on the problems of dealing with timed release of confidential information and simplifying its access once public: it is a common issue in the industry, government and day-to-day life.We introduce the "HP Time Vault Service", based on the emerging Identifier-based Encryption (IBE) cryptography schema. IBE (public) encryption keys specify the disclosure time. These keys are used to encrypt confidential information. An independent time server generates and publishes IBE decryption keys correspondent to the current time, at predefined intervals.We discuss the advantages of this approach against current approaches based on traditional cryptography. A web-service based prototype is described, as a proof of concept.

It is well understood that using a software component methodology can simplify the development and maintenance of systems. Web services allow this vision to be extended allowing components to be made available on the Internet. This paper proposes the use of trust services as third party Web services that allow trust operations to be extracted from solutions and packaged as components. This has obvious advantages in simplifying the task of engendering trust in solutions-both during their creation and in simplifying the maintenance. The paper further argues that using a web service model supports reusability of not only the software but also the operational environment where the software runs. This operational environment is considered particularly critical in providing security and trust operations.

Recent IT attacks demonstrated how vulnerable consumers and enterprises are when adopting commercial and widely deployed operating systems, software applications and solutions. Diversity in software applications is fundamental to increase chances of survivability to faults and attacks. Current approaches to diversity are mainly based on the development of multiple versions of the same software, their parallel execution and the usage of voting mechanisms. Because of the high cost, they are used mainly for very critical and special cases. We introduce and discuss an alternative method to ensure diversity for common widespread software applications without requiring additional resources. We describe a few encouraging results obtained from simulations.

A policy-based management system is only really useful if it allows not only high level description of abstract policy, but also enables such policy to be refined and eventually mapped into an appropriate configuration for controlling devices in the managed system. Such a full integration has only been discussed in the literature but not realised so far. Our approach, implemented as the POWER prototype, demonstrates a way towards making it a reality in practice.