Privacy with Web Serivces: Intelligence Gathering and Enforcement

Abstract

This paper focuses on agent-based enterprise information technology infrastructure support for privacy in the Web Services Architecture (WSA) in order to enforce privacy policies on Private Information (PI) used by applications. We provision the Web Services Platform (WSP) with mechanisms to not only enforce privacy policies on PI used by a web service, but also gather intelligence about PI that is exchanged in invoking and executing web services. Gathered information written in logs is then analyzed by a Privacy Agent to update a privacy Knowledge Base (KB) that captures information on applications, web services they invoke, context of invocation, and PI stored, managed, and used by the enterprise. This loop – observe execution of web services, update the knowledge base with observations, and then update rules governing privacy enforcement, provides for adaptive learning about the use of PI in the organization and also enforcement of privacy policies in web services executions.