New laws such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) grant users unprecedented control over personal data stored and processed by businesses. Compliance can require expensive manual labor or retrofitting of existing systems, e.g., to handle data retrieval and removal requests. We argue for treating these new requirements as an opportunity for new system designs. These designs should make data ownership a first-class concern and achieve compliance with privacy legislation by construction. A compliant-by-construction system could build a shared database, with similar performance as current systems, from personal databases that let users contribute, audit, retrieve, and remove their personal data through easy-to-understand APIs. Realizing compliant-by-construction systems requires new cross-cutting abstractions that make data dependencies explicit and that augment classic data processing pipelines with ownership information.
We suggest what such abstractions might look like, and highlight existing technologies that we believe make compliant-by-construction systems feasible today. We believe that progress towards such systems is at hand, and highlight challenges for researchers to address to make them a reality.
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This content will become publicly available on July 10, 2024
K9db: Privacy-Compliant Storage For Web Applications By Construction
Data privacy laws like the EU’s GDPR grant users new rights, such as the right to request access to and deletion of their data. Manual compliance with these requests is error-prone and imposes costly burdens especially on smaller organizations, as non-compliance risks steep fines.
K9db is a new, MySQL-compatible database that complies with privacy laws by construction. The key idea is to make the data ownership and sharing semantics explicit in the storage system. This requires K9db to capture and enforce applications’ complex data ownership and sharing semantics, but in exchange simplifies privacy compliance. Using a small set of schema annotations, K9db infers storage organization, generates procedures for data retrieval and deletion, and reports compliance errors if an application risks violating the GDPR.
Our K9db prototype successfully expresses the data sharing semantics of real web applications, and guides developers to getting privacy compliance right. K9db also matches or exceeds the performance of existing storage systems, at the cost of a modest increase in state size.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10486260
- Publisher / Repository:
- USENIX
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 17th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Boston, MA, USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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