Research Challenges in Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language Ninghui Li Department of Computer Science and CERIAS Purdue University This is ongoing work.

Outline Enforcement Consistency Expressive power Usability March 22, 2004 2

Enforcement Objective: an EPAL Policy needs to be enforced when data are accessed. Challenge: it is inefficient to have each data-base access to call an EPAL policy engine. Research problem: how to translate an EPAL policy into policy configurations in lower-level access control mechanism e.g., into Virtual Private Database policies March 22, 2004 3

Consistency Objective: needs to ensure that an EPAL policy is sufficient to enforce a higher-level privacy policy (e.g., in P3P) promised to customers Challenge: lacks a sufficiently expressive higher-level formal language for expressing privacy policies Research problem: to come up with such a language such that consistency can be checked automatically March 22, 2004 4

Expressive power Objective: needs to ensure that one can express desirable policies in an Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language Challenge: how to deal with dynamic enterprise environments how to control who can change which parts of a policy and how Research problem: to come up with administration models for enterprise privacy management March 22, 2004 5

Usability Problem: needs to ensure that policies can be authored correctly and conveniently Challenge: policy understanding and policy composition are made difficult by the use of both allow and deny with ordered conflict resolution Research problem: to measure/improve usability March 22, 2004 6

Summary Many challenges remain in the area of Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language enforcement consistency expressive power usability Further research is needed March 22, 2004 7