Collaborative Policy Administration

Policy-based management is a very effective method to protect sensitive information. However, the overclaim of privileges is widespread in emerging applications, including mobile applications and social network services, because the applications' users involved in policy administration have little knowledge of policy-based management. The overclaim can be leveraged by malicious applications, then lead to serious privacy leakages and financial loss. To resolve this issue, this paper proposes a novel policy administration mechanism, referred to as collaborative policy administration (CPA for short), to simplify the policy administration. In CPA, a policy administrator can refer to other similar policies to set up their own policies to protect privacy and other sensitive information. This paper formally defines CPA and proposes its enforcement framework. Furthermore, to obtain similar policies more effectively, which is the key step of CPA, a text mining-based similarity measure method is presented. We evaluate CPA with the data of Android applications and demonstrate that the text mining-based similarity measure method is more effective in obtaining similar policies than the previous category-based method.