A privacy-aware access control model for distributed network monitoring

Abstract

Despite the usefulness of network monitoring for the operation, maintenance, control and protection of communication networks, as well as law enforcement, network monitoring activities are surrounded by serious privacy implications. Their inherent leakage-proneness is harshened due to the increasing complexity of the monitoring procedures and infrastructures, that may include multiple traffic observation points, distributed mitigation mechanisms and even inter-operator cooperation. However, current approaches present limitations in effectively addressing such privacy issues, as they have not been designed for meeting the particular requirements of distributed network monitoring and conceptualising the corresponding functionalities and infrastructures; additionally, they are not suitable for highly dynamic and distributed environments and for automating privacy-awareness. In this paper, we introduce a new access control model that aims at addressing these concerns; it is conceived on the basis of data protection legislation, as well as distributed network monitoring. The proposed approach provides rich expressiveness, captures all the underlying concepts along with their associations and enables the specification of contextual authorisation policies and * Corresponding author.Email address: epapag@icbnet.ntua.gr (Eugenia I. Papagiannakopoulou) ⋆ This is a revised and expanded version of a paper that appeared in the proceedings of the 4th MITACS Workshop on Foundations & Practice of Security, Paris, France, May 2011, pp. 208-217 [44]. Computers & Electrical Engineering 2011 June 7, 2012 expressive separation and binding of duty constraints. Finally, two key innovations of our work consist in the ability to define access control rules in any possible level of abstraction and in enabling a verification procedure which results in inherently privacy-aware workflows, thus minimising run-time reasoning overheads and fostering the realisation of the Privacy by Design vision. Preprint submitted to Elsevier

An ontology‐based approach towards comprehensive workflow modelling

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