Revani: Revising and Verifying Normative Specifications for Privacy

Privacy remains a major challenge today, partly because it brings together social and technical considerations. Yet, current software engineering focuses only on the technical aspects. In contrast, the authors' approach, Revani, understands privacy from the standpoint of sociotechnical systems (STSs), with particular attention on the social elements of STSs. They specify STSs via a combination of technical mechanisms and social norms founded on accountability. Revani provides a way to formally represent mechanisms and norms and applies model checking to verify whether specified mechanisms and norms would satisfy stakeholder requirements. Additionally, Revani provides a set of design patterns and a revision tool to update an STS specification as necessary. The authors demonstrate the work of Revani on a healthcare emergency use case pertaining to patient privacy during disasters.