Nowadays modern applications base their innovation regarding the services they provide on personalized information that are collected from the users that access these services. In parallel, the degree of the newly presented threats that aim on reveling users’ identity as well as on gaining unauthorized access on their personal data is increasing dramatically. One of the major issues in the field of designing and operating modern Information Systems is the users’ privacy protection along with the protection of their private data and their intellectual property.
Software engineering is an essential aspect for obtaining a systematic, disciplined and quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software and services. Incorporating privacy during the engineering process is of vital importance for assuring the development of reliable, correct, robust and trustful systems as well as adaptive and evolving software services that satisfy users’ requirements. To this extend the need to investigate methods and tools that will assist developers in constructing more reliable privacy-aware information systems and services, is fully justified.
One of today’s challenges in the software engineering field is how to make users trust the software that they use in their everyday activities either for professional or recreational reasons. The way users trust the respective software depends on various elements, one of which is the protection of their privacy. Additionally, current research in the software engineering field highlights the path of addressing trust issues early in the system’s development process during the design rather than the implementation phase. Thus, it is of vital importance to examine and identify how the users’ privacy can be protected in the early development stages, and especially during system design.
My long-term research goal is to effectively develop privacy-aware software systems for various environments. My research position is that privacy-related issues are many and varied, as privacy itself is a multifaceted concept. Privacy comes in many forms, relating to what it is that one wishes to keep private. Thus, it is important to understand privacy through the development of ontologies, languages, models, architectures and tools and consider it as an integrated aspect of the software system development process. The development of the above will also assist on examining the true relation between privacy and security both in the technical and social dimension.
The establishment of an adaptive security and privacy aware framework that will assist on the elicitation, modelling, design and implementation of security and privacy related requirements applicable in both problem and solution domains remains one of the most important research goals.
