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Refining Privacy-Aware Data Flow Diagrams

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Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 13085))

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Abstract

Privacy, like security, is a non-functional property, yet most software design tools are focused on functional aspects, using for instance Data Flow Diagrams (DFDs). In previous work, a conceptual model was introduced where DFDs were extended into so-called Privacy-Aware Data Flow Diagrams (PA-DFDs) with the aim of adding specific privacy checks to existing DFDs. An implementation to add such automatic checks has also been developed. In this paper, we define the notion of refinement for both DFDs and PA-DFDs as a special type of structure-preserving map (or graph homomorphism). We also provide three algorithms to find, check and transform refinements, and we show that the standard diagram “transform\(\rightarrow \)refine/refine\(\rightarrow \)transform” commutes. We have implemented our algorithms in a proof-of-concept tool called DFD Refinery, and have applied it to realistic scenarios.

This research has been partially supported by the Cultural Office of the Saudi Embassy in Berlin, Germany and by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrądet) under Grant 2018-04230 “Perspex”.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Source code available at https://github.com/alshareef-hanaa/Refining_PA-DFD.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Hanaa Alshareef & Sandro Stucki

  2. University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Gerardo Schneider

Authors
  1. Hanaa Alshareef
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  2. Sandro Stucki
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  3. Gerardo Schneider
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hanaa Alshareef .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of York, York, UK

    Radu Calinescu

  2. Carnegie Mellon University, Moffett Field, CA, USA

    Corina S. Păsăreanu

A Additional Transformation Rules

A Additional Transformation Rules

Fig. 8.
figure 8

B-DFD flow types and corresponding transformation rules – Part 2.

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Fig. 9.
figure 9

B-DFD flow types and corresponding transformation rules – Part 3.

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Alshareef, H., Stucki, S., Schneider, G. (2021). Refining Privacy-Aware Data Flow Diagrams. In: Calinescu, R., Păsăreanu, C.S. (eds) Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13085. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92124-8_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92124-8_8

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-92124-8

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