<p dir="ltr">This thesis presents an in depth study and evaluation of a class of secure multiparty protocols that enable execution of a confidential software program $\mathcal{P}$ owned by Alice, on confidential data $\mathcal{D}$ owned by Bob, without revealing anything about $\mathcal{P}$ or $\mathcal{D}$ in the process. Our initial adverserial model is an honest-but-curious adversary, which we later extend to a malicious adverarial setting. Depending on the requirements, our protocols can be set up such that the output $\mathcal{P(D)}$ may only be learned by Alice, Bob, both, or neither (in which case an agreed upon third party would learn it). Most of our protocols are run by only two online parties which can be Alice and Bob, or alternatively they could be two commodity cloud servers (in which case neither Alice nor Bob participate in the protocols' execution - they merely initialize the two cloud servers, then go offline). We implemented and evaluated some of these protocols as prototypes that we made available to the open source community via Github. We report our experimental findings that compare and contrast the viability of our various approaches and those that already exist. All our protocols achieve the said goals without revealing anything other than upper bounds on the sizes of program and data.</p><p><br></p>

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of affect on privacy concerns and privacy behaviors. A considerable amount of research in the information systems field argues that privacy concerns, usually conceptualized as an evaluation of privacy risks, influence privacy behaviors. However, recent theoretical work shows that affect, a pre-cognitive evaluation, has a significant effect on preferences and choices in risky situations. Affect is contrasted with cognitive issues in privacy decision making and the role of affective versus cognitive-consequentialist factors is reviewed in privacy context. A causal model was developed to address how affect influences privacy concerns and privacy behaviors. The model of privacy risk proposed in this model argues that affect (or “feelings”) influences privacy behaviors directly as well as thru privacy concerns. To test the model, subjects were recruited using Mechanical Turk and paid for their participation. Affect, the key construct in this research, was measured using a word association technique as well as methods developed in the implicit attitudes research. Well-known scales were used to measure privacy concerns and behavioral intentions. Data was collected from subjects using a pretested privacy scenario. Data analysis suggests that, in line with published IS research, privacy concerns affect privacy behaviors. Affect has no impact on privacy concerns nor on privacy behaviors at the traditional 5% level of significance, though it is significant at the 10% level of significance. Improving the instruments used to measure affect, use of a large sample size to detect small effect sizes and more control over the instrument administration instead of an online survey are suggested for future research.

As mobile phones become increasingly ubiquitous in today’s world, academic and public audiences alike are curious about the interaction between mobile technologies and social norms. To investigate this phenomenon, I examined how individuals use technology to actively manage their communication behaviors. Through a three-month research project on usage patterns of Burner, a mobile application, this thesis explores the relationships among technology, culture, and privacy. Burner is a service that equips individuals with the means to create, maintain, and/or dissolve social ties by providing temporary, disposable numbers to customers. The application offers a way to communicate without relying on a user’s personal phone number. In other words, Burner acts as a “privacy layer” for mobile phones. It also provides a valuable platform to examine how customers use the application as a strategy for communication management. This thesis represents a marriage of practice and theory: (1) As an applied enterprise, the project was constructed as a customer needs assessment intending to examine how the service was situated in the lives of its users. The findings have successfully been applied to my client’s company strategy and have led to a more informed customer approach. (2) As an academic endeavor, this research contributes to existing scholarship in anthropology, computer-mediated communication, privacy, and design. The results provide rich fodder for discussions about the impact of mobile communication and services.

Social network sites (SNSs) have become very popular, with more than 1.39 billion people using Facebook alone. The ability to share large amounts of personal information with these services, such as location traces, photos, and messages, has raised a number of privacy concerns. The popularity of these services has enabled new research directions, allowing researchers to collect large amounts of data from SNSs to gain insight into how people share information, and to identify and resolve issues with such services. There are challenges to conducting such research responsibly, ensuring studies are ethical and protect the privacy of participants, while ensuring research outputs are sustainable and can be reproduced in the future. These challenges motivate the application of a theoretical framework that can be used to understand, identify, and mitigate the privacy impacts of emerging SNSs, and the conduct of ethical SNS studies. In this thesis, we apply Nissenbaum's model of contextual integrity to the study of SNSs. We develop an architecture for conducting privacy-preserving and reproducible SNS studies that upholds the contextual integrity of participants. We apply the architecture to the study of informed consent to show that contextual integrity can be leveraged to improve the acquisition of consent in such studies. We then use contextual integrity to diagnose potential privacy violations in an emerging form of SNS.

In peoples hyperconnected lives, a price to pay is their internet privacy and the different risks it faces the second their browser connects to the web. One such risk comes from how web tracking collect and analyze users information. This paper explores an approach to how web browsers can inform its users about the web tracking technique Fingerprinting, and through the concept presentation of this approach see: what key key aspects of visual aesthetics that affects the users experience when being informed; and to what extent differences in technological interest and knowledge affect users reception of Fingerprinting information, and the implementation implications the differences leads to. For this purpose a high fidelity prototype was created to: represent the concept of web browsers having integrated educational pages meant to inform its users on topics such as Fingerprinting, and to; be used in a user test. The results showed: a lack of knowledge on the existence of Fingerprinting; that differences in technological interest and knowledge among users affected what aspects of visual aesthetics they valued; and that those with less technological interest and knowledge to a higher degree had their attitudes towards Internet Privacy affected by the prototype’s information. It also showed that the differences affects users approach and interactions with software, and that the design implications this brings are to be considered for future browser functionality implementations. / <p>Självständigt Examensarbete (Forskningsartikel)</p>

The primary aim of this dissertation thesis is to present a comprehensive analysis of the issue of personal data protection in the Czech Republic with regard to the regulation in the EU. The secondary goal of this work is to explore the historical genesis and material sources of the issue in question. The core information sources from which the thesis draws represent laws, judicial decisions, official documents and Czech/foreign expert literature. In order to achieve the objectives of the work, the methods that are generally applicable in the field of legal science were used. Therefore the method of description (including classification), analysis and synthesis is mostly applied. The dissertation consists of seven chapters. After a short introduction, it begins with a sociological treatise on the importance of the protection of personal data in the 21st century. Privacy is currently an important topic in the light of the rapid development of information and communication technologies which have been developing since the second half of the 20th century and burgeoned since the turn of the century. Technological innovations allow for the collection of personal data on a large scale. These privacy infringements can prove to be irreversible, hence the importance of this area of law. The personal data...

Bien que la technologie de composition de services Web soit considérée comme l’une des technologies les plus prometteuses pour l’intégration des sources de données hétérogènes et multiples ainsi que pour la réalisation d’opérations complexes, la question de la protection des données personnelles demeure l’une des préoccupation majeure liés à cette technologie. Ainsi, lors d’un processus de composition, l’échange de données entre toutes les entités – tels que, les services Web recueillant et fournissant des données, les individus dont les données peuvent être fournies et gérées par les services Web, les systèmes qui composent les services Web et les clients finaux des services – est une étape nécessaire et indispensable pour répondre à des requêtes complexes. En conséquence, des données personnelles sont échangées et manipulées entre toutes les entités du système. Notre objectif dans cette thèse est la conception et le développement d’un cadre permettant d’améliorer la composition des services Web avec des mécanismes de protection des données personnelles. Pour atteindre cet objectif, nous avons proposé une approche générale composée de trois éléments. Premièrement, nous avons proposé un modèle formel de confidentialité pour permettre aux services Web de décrire leurs contraintes de confidentialité liées aux données personnelles. Notre modèle permet une spécification des contraintes de confidentialité relative non seulement au niveau des données manipulées, mais aussi au niveau des opérations invoquées par les services. Deuxièmement, nous développons un algorithme de compatibilité qui permet de vérifier formellement la compatibilité entre les exigences et les politiques de confidentialité de tous les services lors d’un processus de composition. Troisièmement, dans le cas où certains services dans la composition sont incompatibles par rapport à leur spécification de confidentialité, nous avons introduit une nouvelle approche basée sur un modèle de négociation dans la perspective de trouver une composition compatible (c’est-à-dire, d’obtenir la compatibilité de toutes les spécifications de confidentialité des services impliqués dans la composition). Enfin, nous avons mis en œuvre les techniques présentées dans cette thèse au sein du prototype PAIRSE et mené une étude de performance sur les algorithmes proposés / While Web service composition technologies have been beneficial to the integration of a wealth of information sources and the realization of complex and personalized operations, the issue of privacy is considered by many as a major concern in services computing. Central to the development of the composition process is the exchange of sensitive and private data between all parties: Web services collecting and providing data, individuals whose data may be provided and managed by Web services, systems composing Web service to answer complex queries, and requesters. As a consequence, managing privacy between all parties of the system is far from being an easy task. Our goal in this thesis is to build the foundations of an integrated framework to enhance Web service composition with privacy protection capabilities. To this aim, we firstly propose a formal privacy model to allow Web services to describe their privacy specifications. Our privacy model goes beyond traditional data-oriented models by dealing with privacy not only at the data level but also service level. Secondly, we develop a compatibility-matching algorithm to check privacy compatibility between privacy requirements and policies within a composition. Thirdly, in the case where some services in the composition are incompatible regarding their privacy specifications, we introduce a novel approach based on a negotiation model to reach compatibility of concerned services (i.e. services that participate in a composition which are incompatible). Finally, we conduct an extensive performance study of the proposed algorithms. The techniques presented in this dissertation are implemented in PAIRSE prototype

Un service du nuage peut employer des techniques de sécurités pour assurer la sécurité de l’information. Ces techniques protègent une donnée personnelle en la rendant inintelligible pour toutes personnes autres que l’utilisateur du service. En contrepartie, certaines fonctionnalités ne peuvent plus être implémentées. Par exemple, la technique du chiffrement symétrique rend les données inintelligibles, mais empêche le calcul sur ces données.Cette thèse avance qu’un service du nuage doit composer les techniques pour assurer la sécurité de l’information sans perdre de fonctionnalités. Elle se base sur l’étude de la composition de trois techniques qui sont le chiffrement, la fragmentation verticale et les calculs côté client. Cette étude montre que la composition sécurise sans perdre de fonctionnalités, mais complexifie l’écriture du service. La thèse propose alors un nouveau langage pour l’écriture de services du nuage qui assurent la sécurité des données personnelles par compositions des techniques de sécurité.Ce langage est muni de lois algébriques pour dériver,systématiquement, un service local sans protection vers son équivalent sécurisé du nuage. Le langage est implémenté en Idris et profite de son système de type expressif pour vérifier la composition correcte des techniques de cryptographie. Dans le même temps, un encodage traduit le langage en ProVerif, un vérificateur de modèle pour l’analyse automatique des propriétés de sécurité sur les protocoles cryptographiques. Cette traduction vérifie alors la sécurité des données personnelles dans le service. / A cloud service can use security techniques to ensure information privacy. These techniques protect privacy by converting the client’s personal data into unintelligible text. But they can also cause the loss of some functionalities of the service. For instance, a symmetric-key cipher protects privacy by converting readable personal data into unreadable one. However, this causes the loss of computational functionalities on this data.This thesis claims that a cloud service has to compose security techniques to ensure information privacy without the loss of functionalities. This claim is based on the study of the composition of three techniques: symmetric cipher, vertical data fragmentation and client-side computation. This study shows that the composition makes the service privacy preserving, but makes its formulation overwhelming. In response, the thesis offers a new language for the writing of cloud services that enforces information privacy using the composition of security techniques. This language comes with a set of algebraic laws to systematically transform a local service without protection into its cloud equivalent protected by composition. An Idris implementation harnesses the Idris expressive type system to ensure the correct composition of security techniques. Furthermore, an encoding translates the language intoProVerif, a model checker for automated reasoning about the security properties found in cryptographic protocols. This translation checks that the service preserves the privacy of its client.

Problemet man stöter på när man utvecklar plattformar för tredjepartsapplikationer är att det finns en ny lag som ställer hårda krav för hur man ska göra. GDPR är fortfarande så pass nytt att många företag inte har kunskap om hur man ska förhålla sig till lagen eller hur den påverkar projektet. Vi har intervjuat tre olika informanter och analyserat en dom som föll mot ett tidigare projekt för att upplysa de olika problem som kan uppstå samt för att skapa en förståelse för hur man bör förändra utförandet av utvecklingsprojekt i företag. Informanterna som användes har samtliga haft olika professioner för att skapa en så bred problembild som möjligt. Detta bidrog också till att informanterna fick bemöta andras informanters problem. I studien nämns Sigma Technology som fallföretag eftersom ett av deras projekt, Front-VL, användes som referenspunkt. I slutet av studien ges förslag på vad Sigma behöver göra för att kunna uppnå de lagar och krav som ställs i och med GDPR. Studien visar att man i ett tidigt stadie behöver analysera och kartlägga för hur GDPR ska hanteras i projektet och se lagen som ett ramverk att förhålla sig mot samt att öka kunskapen om lagen hos utvecklare.

University of Macau / Faculty of Law