Privacy Enforcement with an Extended Role-Based Access Control Model

Privacy enforcement has been one of the most important challenges in IT area. Current privacy practices within companies and organizations, e.g. enabling a P3P compliant policy, incorporating a privacy seal program, etc., cannot truly protect consumer privacy. Privacy protection can only be achieved by enforcing privacy policies within an organization’s online and offline data processing systems. Traditional security models are more or less inappropriate for enforcing basic privacy requirements, such as purpose binding. This paper proposes an extended role-based access control (RBAC) model, called Privacy-Aware Role-Based Access Control (PARBAC) model, for enforcing privacy policies within an organization. The PARBAC model combines RBAC, Domain-Type Enforcement, and privacy protection by modeling business purposes and data policies. Consented consumer privacy preferences are recorded as data policies, which govern how to use actual consumer data. One of the key elements in a privacy policy is purpose. The actual purpose of a business operation to consumer data must be consistent with the purpose consented by the consumer. This is the so-called purpose binding privacy requirement. This paper focuses on enforcing this requirement. Privacy enforcement mechanism with the PARBAC model is then discussed and a privacy scenario is illustrated to describe its application.