Fine-grained disclosure control for app ecosystems

Abstract

The modern computing landscape contains an increasing number of app ecosystems, where users store personal data on platforms such as Facebook or smartphones. APIs enable third-party applications (apps) to utilize that data. A key concern associated with app ecosystems is the confidentiality of user data. In this paper, we develop a new model of disclosure in app ecosystems. In contrast with previous solutions, our model is data-derived and semantically meaningful. Information disclosure is modeled in terms of a set of distinguished security views. Each query is labeled with the precise set of security views that is needed to answer it, and these labels drive policy decisions. We explain how our disclosure model can be used in practice and provide algorithms for labeling conjunctive queries for the case of single-atom security views. We show that our approach is useful by demonstrating the scalability of our algorithms and by applying it to the real-world disclosure control system used by Facebook.