Multilateral security requirements analysis for preserving privacy in ubiquitous environments

Privacy is of great concern in ubiquitous environments in which various technologies collect vast amounts of information about ubiquitous users with differing privacy and security interests. This concern also holds for knowledge discovery systems in which data mining technologies infer substantial new knowledge from these data. Various methods have been proposed to preserve privacy in such environments, including privacy preserving data mining, mixes etc. However, it is not clear which of these methods provide the kind of privacy that users are looking for. We take a step back and look at what privacy means, and how the notion of privacy-related data has changed in ubiquitous environments. Further, we look at how we can state privacy requirements for ubiquitous environments through security goals, and we suggest a method for analysing multilateral security requirements which takes into account users’ varying privacy interests. We believe that such a requirements analysis method will help determine whether and when privacy-preserving methods make sense for fulfilling privacy and security requirements of diverse sets of users in ubiquitous environments.status: publishe