Keywords: Privacy, Security, Requirements and Software Engineering; Risk and Legal Compliance

Dr. Breaux is the Director of the CMU Requirements Engineering Lab, where his research program investigates how to specify and design software to comply with policy and law in a trustworthy, reliable manner. His work historically concerned the empirical extraction of legal requirements from policies and law, and has recently studied how to use formal specifications to reason about privacy policy compliance, how to measure and reason over ambiguous and vague policies, and how security and privacy experts and novices estimate the risk of system designs.

To learn more, read about his ongoing research projects or contact him.

Formal Analysis of Privacy Requirements Specifications for Multi-Tier Applications [ PDF ]
(Breaux, Rao)
In proceedings of IEEE RE'13, presents a formal language for expressing and checking privacy requirements specifications for conflicts; findings include techniques to model privacy policies and demonstration of potential conflicts among Facebook, Zynga and AOL Advertising. This conference publication was nominated for best paper.

A Cross-Domain Empirical Study and Legal Evaluation of the Requirements Water Marking Method
(Gordon, Breaux)
In Requirements Engineering J. presents an empirical method for comparing legal requirements from across multiple jurisdictions; findings include analysis of data breach notificaiton laws and requirements water marks to denote high and low standards of care. This extended journal paper is based on a prior IEEE RE'12 conference publication that was nominated for best paper (DOI).

Legally "Reasonable" Security Requirements: A 10-year FTC Retrospective [ PDF ]
(Breaux, Baumer)
In Computers and Security, 30(4): 178-193. Presents empirical results expressing a definition of legally reasonable security derived from FTC regulatory enforcement actions conducted in response to privacy violations.

Analyzing Regulatory Rules for Privacy and Security Requirements [ PDF ]
(Breaux, Antón)
In IEEE TSE, 34(1): 5-20. Presents a method to extract access rights and obligations from regulations to reduce unwanted and unlawful uses and disclosures of protected information in electronic information systems.

Legal Requirements, Compliance and Practice: An Industry Case Study in Accessibility [ PDF ]
(Breaux, Antón, Boucher, Dorfman)
In IEEE RE'08. We present preliminary results from a gap analysis on CISCO product requirements using U.S. Section 508 accessibility law; the findings include five "best practice" refinement patterns to improve regulatory harmony.

Semantic Parameterization: A Process for Modeling Domain Descriptions [ PDF ]
(Breaux, Antón, Doyle)
In ACM TOSEM, 18(2): 5. Presents a method for mapping descriptions of a domain (e.g., actors, actions, goals) to Description Logic formula. The resulting logical theory can be used to formally compare and reason about software requirements.

NIST publishes new Privacy Control Catalog in SP 800-53
(July 19, 2011)
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) proposed Appendix J to Special Publication 800-53 to aid federal information systems with satisfying critical privacy requirements. (see NIST Website).

FTC promotes Privacy by Design in new framework
(December 1, 2010)
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) proposes new privacy framework, including Do Not Track and Privacy by Design to address increasing advances in technology and complex, often invisible, data practices (see FTC Website).

SEC proposes Python as cash-flow e-file language
(April 7, 2010)
Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) proposes to require providers of asset-backed securities to file "a computer program of the contractual cash flow provisions of the securities in the form of downloadable source code in Python" (see SEC Website).

U.S. Bill S.773 proposes common security configuration language
(April 1, 2009)
Early draft of the Cybersecurity Act of 2009 proposes a "standard computer-readable language for completely specifying the configuration of software" and a standard language "to communicate vulnerability data to software users in real time," similar to the FDCC, CVE and related standards.

36th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE'14)
Dates: Jun 1-7, 2014, Hyderabad, India
Submissions: Sep 13, 2013 (research papers)

20th International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundations of Software Quality (REFSQ)
Dates: Apr 7-10, 2014, Essen, Germany
Submissions: Oct 9, 2013 (abstracts), Oct 16 (papers)

22nd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE'14)
Dates: Aug 25-29, 2014, Karlskrona, Sweden
Submissions: Mar 3/ Mar 10 (abstracts/research papers)

Archives of the International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Law (RELAW)