PDGuard: Control and secure the processing of personal data

This repository contains the implementation of a framework for the control and secure processing of personal data which we call PDGuard. The full decription of this framework has been published by the International Journal of Information Security. A pre-print is also available.

Overview

Online personal data are rarely, if ever, effectively controlled by the users they concern. Worse, as demonstrated by the numerous daily leaks, the organizations that store and process them fail to adequately safeguard the required confidentiality. The PDGuard framework contained in this repository defines, prototypes, and demonstrates an architecture and an implementation that address both of the aforementioned problems. In the context of PDGuard, personal data are always stored encrypted as opaque objects. Processing them can only be performed through the PDGuard API, under data and action-specific authorizations supplied online by third-party agents. Through these agents end-users can easily and reliably authorize and audit how organizations use their personal data. Thus, PDGuard changes the problem of personal data management from the, apparently, intractable problem of supervising processes, operations, personnel, and a large software stack to that of auditing for compliance the applications that use the framework. The applicability of the PDGuard framework is demonstrated through a stand-alone e-shop application and through the integration of PDGuard into the identity application used by The Guardian newspaper's website.

PDGuard setup

To set up PDGuard, you have to install the following requirements:

Java

PDGuard uses Java 8. You can install it as below.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt update
sudo apt install oracle-java8-installer

Play

PDGuard uses the Play framework to port an instance of an escrow agent.

You can install and run Play by downloading Activator Then, you add activator to you classpath as follows:

On Linux, use

export PATH=/path/to/activator:$PATH

Escrow Agent

Escrow Agent consists of the three sub-projects listed below.

• common
• auth
• web

common

Common sub-project includes common code used both by the auth and web sub-projects.

auth

This sub-project is responsible for the authorization flow and the share of encryption keys to authenticated and authorized entities.

This is the component that data controller's application interact with to get the encryption keys of data subject's personal data.

web

This is an prototype implementation of Escrow Agent's web UI. A data subject can log into this to set new authorization rules, modify existing ones or review actions on their personal data by data controllers.

Run Escrow Agent

You can run escrow agent's application as a whole but you can also run each sub-project seperately. (It is going to take a while the first time you run Escrow Agent).

Run the auth sub-project

activator
project auth
run

Now your app runs on https://localhost:9443

Run web sub-project

activator
project web
run

Now your local web UI runs on http://localhost:9000

e-shop apllication

A mock e-shop application is implemented to visualize and demonstrate the use of the escrow agent's encryption and decryption abilities into a real application.

Run e-shop

E-shop application uses Play framework too. To run it, execute the following command

activator run

e-shop runs on http://localhost:9043