Award Abstract # 2245374
Collaborative Research: SaTC: CORE: Medium: Compliance as a Service (CaSe): A Reflective Approach to Enforcing User Privacy Regulations

NSF Org: CNS
Division Of Computer and Network Systems
Recipient: NEW JERSEY INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
Initial Amendment Date: July 7, 2023
Latest Amendment Date: August 31, 2023
Award Number: 2245374
Award Instrument: Continuing Grant
Program Manager: Karen Karavanic
CNS
 Division Of Computer and Network Systems
CSE
 Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering
Start Date: July 15, 2023
End Date: June 30, 2026 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $60,925.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $39,914.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2023 = $39,914.00
History of Investigator:
  • Shantanu Sharma (Principal Investigator)
    shantanu.sharma@njit.edu
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: New Jersey Institute of Technology
323 DR MARTIN LUTHER KING JR BLVD
NEWARK
NJ  US  07102-1824
(973)596-5275
Sponsor Congressional District: 10
Primary Place of Performance: New Jersey Institute of Technology
323 DR MARTIN LUTHER KING JR BLVD
NEWARK
NJ  US  07102-1824
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
10
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): SGBMHQ7VXNH5
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): Secure &Trustworthy Cyberspace
Primary Program Source: 01002324DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
01002425DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT

01002526DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 7924, 025Z
Program Element Code(s): 806000
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.070

ABSTRACT

This project seeks to enable transforming existing data infrastructures to comply with user data protection legislation and regulations. The project's novelties are its formal model of data protection policy compliance that helps system designers to reason about regulations and demonstrate systems? compliance with them. The project's broader significance is its potential to address consumer privacy and data security concerns associated with emerging technologies, such as the Internet of Things and cloud computing. As recent events involving corporate use of consumer data have demonstrated, privacy and data security issues are increasingly connected in the modern information age to concerns about democracy, equality, national security, and freedom, all of which carrying implications for both individuals and society. The benefits of this work include managing cyber threats and addressing data privacy and policy concerns in applications that utilize personal and sensitive data. The work also includes educational outreach efforts targeting community college and high school students, as well as students from underrepresented groups in computing with the goal to expose them to research with community benefits.

The project consists of four research thrusts. The first provides a grounding of data protection legislation and regulation to provide a system design-centric formal model of policy compliance. This involves studying the implications of developing a formal model in terms of validating and proving compliance with regulations. The second thrust tackles the challenges in managing policies of transformed data sent across different system components, which involves designing data abstractions that express the data and policy transformation. The third thrust includes methods that allow efficient and fast adaptation of existing and legacy data systems to policy changes. This includes designing data structures that are sharded based on policies, enabling isolation of the data shards impacted by policy changes. The fourth thrust provides a scalable distributed logging system to cater to the auditing requirements of data protection regulations.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.

Print this page

Back to Top of page