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A Methodology for Retrofitting Privacy and Its Application to e-Shopping Transactions

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Advances in Cyber Security: Principles, Techniques, and Applications

Abstract

The huge growth of e-shopping has brought convenience to customers and increased revenue to merchants and financial entities. Moreover, e-shopping has evolved to possess many functions, features, and requirements (e.g., regulatory ones). However, customer privacy has been mostly ignored, and while it is easy to add simple privacy to an existing system, this typically causes loss of functions. What is needed is enhanced privacy on one hand, and retaining the critical functions and features on the other hand. This is a dilemma which typifies the “privacy versus utility” paradigm, especially when it is applied to an established primitive with operational systems, where applying conventional privacy-by-design principles is not possible and completely altering information flows and system topologies is not an option. This dilemma is becoming more problematic with the advent of regulations such as the European GDPR, which requires companies to provide better privacy guarantees whenever and wherever personal information is involved. In this chapter, we put forward a methodology for privacy augmentation design that is specially suitable for real-world engineering processes that need to adhere to the aforementioned constraints. We call this the “utility, privacy, and then utility again” paradigm. In particular, we start from the state-of-the-art industry systems that we need to adapt; then we add privacy enhancing mechanisms, reducing functionality in order to tighten privacy to the fullest (privacy); and finally, we incorporate tools which add back lost features, carefully relaxing privacy this time (utility again). Specifically, we apply this process to current e-shopping infrastructures, making them privacy respectful without losing functionality. This gives an e-shopping system with enhanced privacy features, presents a set of “utility-privacy trade-offs,” and showcases a practical approach implementing the notion of “privacy by design” while maintaining as much compatibility as possible with current infrastructures. Finally, we note that we implemented and tested performance of our design, verifying its reasonable added costs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/payment-services-psd-2-directive-eu-2015-2366_en. Last access on April 17th, 2018.

  2. 2.

    https://www.eugdpr.org/. Last access on April 17th, 2018.

  3. 3.

    A conference proceedings version of this chapter is available in [34] and further contextualization is given in [29].

  4. 4.

    As well as many proposals in nonacademic forums. See, for instance, https://z.cash/ (a modified implementation of Zerocash) and https://cryptonote.org/. Last access on March 21st, 2018.

  5. 5.

    See https://payments.amazon.com/help/5968. Last access on April 18th, 2018.

  6. 6.

    Key-privacy security requires that an eavesdropper in possession of a ciphertext not be able to tell which specific key, out of a set of known public keys, is the one under which the ciphertext was created, meaning the receiver is anonymous from the point of view of the adversary.

  7. 7.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Verification_System. Last access on March 21st, 2018.

  8. 8.

    https://magento.com/sites/default/files/White%20Paper%20-%20Magento%202.0%20Performance%20and%20Scalability%2003.31.16.pdf. Last access on March 21st, 2018.

  9. 9.

    https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/global/about-visa/documents/visa-facts-figures-jan-2017.pdf. Last access on March 21st, 2018.

  10. 10.

    https://ripple.com/. Ripple is an open system for interoperation between different payment methods, e.g., Bitcoin, real currencies, or account-based transactions.

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Acknowledgements

The work of Jesus Diaz was done in part in the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and while visiting the Network Security Lab at Columbia University. The work of Seung Geol Choi was supported in part by ONR award N0001418WX01542 and NSF award #1618269. The work of David Arroyo was supported by projects S2013/ICE-3095-CM (CIBERDINE) and MINECO DPI2015-65833-P of the Spanish Government. The work of Francisco B. Rodriguez was supported by projects MINECO TIN2014-54580-R and TIN2017-84452-R of the Spanish Government. The work of Moti Yung was done in part while visiting the Simons Institute for Theory of Computing, UC Berkeley.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. BBVA Next Technologies, Madrid, Spain

    Jesus Diaz

  2. United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD, USA

    Seung Geol Choi

  3. Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), Madrid, Spain

    David Arroyo

  4. Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia

    Angelos D. Keromytis

  5. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    Francisco B. Rodriguez

  6. Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

    Moti Yung

  7. Google Inc., Menlo Park, CA, USA

    Moti Yung

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  1. Jesus Diaz
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Correspondence to Jesus Diaz .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Providence University, Taichung, Taiwan

    Kuan-Ching Li

  2. School of Cyber Engineering, Xidian University, Xi'an, Shaanxi, China

    Xiaofeng Chen

  3. School of Computing and Information Technology, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

    Willy Susilo

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Diaz, J., Choi, S.G., Arroyo, D., Keromytis, A.D., Rodriguez, F.B., Yung, M. (2019). A Methodology for Retrofitting Privacy and Its Application to e-Shopping Transactions. In: Li, KC., Chen, X., Susilo, W. (eds) Advances in Cyber Security: Principles, Techniques, and Applications. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1483-4_7

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