A language for automatically enforcing privacy policies

It is becoming increasingly important for applications to protect sensitive data. With current techniques, the programmer bears the burden of ensuring that the application’s behavior adheres to policies about where sensitive values may flow. Unfortunately, privacy policies are difficult to manage because their global nature requires coordinated reasoning and enforcement. To address this problem, we describe a programming model that makes the system responsible for ensuring adherence to privacy policies. The programming model has two components: 1) core programs describing functionality independent of privacy concerns and 2) declarative, decentralized policies controlling how sensitive values are disclosed. Each sensitive value encapsulates multiple views; policies describe which views are allowed based on the output context. The system is responsible for automatically ensuring that outputs are consistent with the policies. We have implemented this programming model in a new functi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: POPL
• Authors: Jean Yang, Kuat Yessenov, Armando Solar-Lezama
• Keywords: Constraint Language, POPL 2012, Programming Languages, Run Time System, Static Semantics