Satisfying Complex Data Security Requirements in Digital Business Ecosystems

Digital Business Ecosystems (DBEs) involve collaboration and sharing of data across various independent parties. Data sharing comes with security requirements, e.g. who may see which data elements. Often, these security requirements can be satisfied by well-known techniques, such as access controls, but sometimes the traditional solutions are not sufficient. For example, in our use case there is a requirement to sum up the revenue of companies by the government to calculate the average revenue for an industry, without disclosing the revenue of each company. To satisfy these kinds of requirements without a trusted third party, advanced Privacy-Preserving Computation (PPC) techniques are needed. However, the field of PPC is technically difficult to understand for most people and is highly specialized. We are not aware of a unified, comprehensive framework that can guide the systematic selection and integration of PPC methods, given the security requirements of a DBE use case. Therefore, our research goal is to establish such a framework. In this paper, two motivating examples are given, taken from the music digital business ecosystem we participate in.