Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Supervisor

Miriam A. M. Capretz

Abstract

Privacy can be defined as the right of an individual to have information about them accessed and used in conformity with what they consider acceptable. Privacy preservation in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an open problem. A solution for this problem must include features that support privacy preservation in each area of SOA. This thesis focuses on the areas of service description and discovery. The problems in these areas are that currently it is not possible to describe how a service provider deals with information received from a service consumer as well as discover a service that satisfies the privacy preferences of a consumer. Research has been carried out in these areas, but there is currently no framework which offers a solution that supports a rich description of privacy policies and their integration in the process of service discovery. Thus, the main goal of this thesis is to propose a privacy preservation framework for the areas of service description and discovery in SOA. The framework enhances service description and discovery with the specification and intersection of privacy policies using a base and domain-specific privacy ontologies. Moreover, the framework enhances these areas with an extension to basic SOA that includes roles responsible for implementing a privacy registry as well as mediating the interactions between service consumers and providers and the privacy preservation component. The framework is evaluated through a health care scenario as privacy preservation is an important issue in this domain.

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