Privacy Risk Analysis Based on System Control Structures: Adapting System-Theoretic Process Analysis for Privacy Engineering

Abstract

To date, top-down efforts to evolve and structure privacy engineering knowledge have tended to reflect common systems engineering/development life cycle activities. A different approach suggests a particular need for technical analytical methods. To help address this need, this paper proposes to adapt for privacy engineering an existing technique, System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), developed for safety engineering. The foundations of STPA are discussed, its security extension, STPA-Sec, is described, and modifications to STPA-Sec are proposed to produce STPA-Priv. STPA-Priv is then applied to a simple illustrative example.