CWI Cryptology Group

Abstract: There is a growing need to formally specify, automatically evaluate, to operate on and to reason about privacy policies. To this end privacy policy specification languages are used, as IBM's Enterprise Privacy Authorization Language (EPAL). Based on the IBM EPAL proposal and its algebraic counterpart EP3P, I have developed a Novel Algebraic Privacy Specification (NAPS) framework, addressing several issues with the original EP3P. In particular NAPS is, in contrast to EP3P, closed under conjunction of arbitrary policies. Beyond that NAPS provides a number of useful operators and a wide variety of algebraic relations, such as distributivity between ordered composition and conjunction of policies. Furthermore NAPS clarifies the semantics of policies and simplifies their writing, while retaining, even enhancing the expressive power of EP3P.