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w3c / wot-security

a repo exclusively for security to better manage issues and security considerations for WoT
https://w3c.github.io/wot-security/
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Update Definitions of Security and Privacy in Architecture Document #134

Closed mmccool closed 5 years ago

mmccool commented 5 years ago

As noted in https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/355, the definitions of Security and Privacy in the Architecture document are too short and really should be based on another standard. Rather than defining them here and/or pointing at another standard, we can just depend on "well-understood" definitions of these terms and delete them from the Arch document. Update: will generate standards-based definitions for these terms instead of just deleting them.

mmccool commented 5 years ago

Issue https://github.com/w3c/wot-architecture/pull/368, if merged, will resolve this issue. There is also a definition of "Personally Identifiable Information". This is less "common" than Security and Privacy so I have not removed it. However, ideally the definition of this term would identify an external official source.

mlagally commented 5 years ago

An external reference for PII is https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso-iec:29100:ed-1:v1:en

mmccool commented 5 years ago

The Architecture TF discussed this and decided that rather than deleting these definitions it would be better to add external references. Some references were found, but it is notable that ISO-IEC defines "Information Security" but not just "Security" as we have been using. See the discussion under https://github.com/w3c/wot-architecture/pull/368.

I propose we define "Security" within the WoT documents to be equivalent to the ISO definition of "Information Security". An alternative would be to define "Security" as a combination of "Information Security" and "Physical Security" since anti-tampering measures may also be important in IoT. However, I personally think we should focus on Information Security and declare Physical Security measures out of scope (or use "Physical Security" explicitly when talking about such things).

mmccool commented 5 years ago

Still in progress. I will create a PR for new standards-based definitions soon.

mmccool commented 5 years ago

This has been done.