WebSci21: Keynote 3

What Can Web Science Teach Us About Designing Governable Computing Systems?

In this talk Daniel J. Weitzner, discusses solutions to the need to balance technical architectures and services with the social (societal) needs and policies of the communities that use them. Underlying this relationship is the need to model and automatically validate that secure systems are compliant and consistent with the policies under which they operate.

Abstract

This talk presents new research in cyber security and privacy, offering a broad approach by which computer science can contribute systems that are better integrated with society’s public policy priorities. Our new approach to cyber security will provide previously unattainable cyber risk pricing metrics to guide private investment decisions, make cyber insurance markets more efficient, and shape cyber security regulations that are more effective. To address privacy needs, we propose changes to the underlying architecture of relational database systems to enable auditable conformance with state-of-the-art privacy values in laws such as the European Union General Data Protection Directive (GDPR). Taken together, this work suggests we can improve computing governance with new extensions of two key concepts in the theory of computation. First, we describe policy soundness: the property of a computing system that shows it is logically sound with respect to a given legal ruleset. Second, technical completeness: the property of a law or regulation which shows the rules are logically complete with respect to the dynamics of a givencomputing system. Building these kinds of abstractions into systems and laws can make computing systems more governable and thus more trustworthy