Privacy reference monitor - A computer model for law compliant privacy protection

Abstract

The Internet and computers did not invent or even cause privacy issues. The issues existed long before the creation of computers and Internet. The existence of The Internet, computers and large data storage make it possible to collect, process and transmit large volumes of data, including personal data. In this paper, we shall study the privacy from following two different views, namely legal framework and computer security model, and attempt to identify the difference between them. Because of the difference, we further argue that the current computer security model is not sufficient to support the privacy requirements in the legal framework. We propose a computer model "privacy reference monitor" to handle those unsupported requirements. The design of the privacy reference monitor is privacy policy neutral with a small number of functions. With minimal functionalities, we believe that it is possible to implement a verifiable privacy reference monitor. © 2009 IEEE.