An extensible taxonomy on privacy and confidentiality.

Abstract

The challenge of ensuring privacy and confidentiality is often tailored to the specific application under observation. Currently, there is a lack of a common framework to compare and assess different solutions in terms of privacy and confidentiality. This hinders navigating a field to search for the appropriate solution if we cannot easily place an application and alternative solutions in the context of its area. All of this makes it harder for an interested party to establish whether it is possible to reapply strategies to new applications and problems. Consequently, it hinders us from converging to better solutions. This work proposes a taxonomy centered on applications’ privacy and confidentiality vulnerabilities to provide the common framework I have discussed. To provide this taxonomy on privacy and confidentiality, I analyzed and classified twenty-one applications, grouped into nineteen distinct types of services. I have successfully validated this work’s taxonomy through an orthogonality demonstration (show that dimensions are disjoint) and a utility demonstration. Furthermore, I have successfully applied this work’s taxonomy in an intelligent infection analysis system in a use case analysis. I have also explained the taxonomy’s facets and levels and provided the method used to build it.