Collaborative Research: DASS: Legally Accountable Cryptographic Computing Systems (LAChS)

社会在管理数字系统方面遇到了困难，管理不善的系统导致社会在信任这些系统执行敏感或高优先级任务的意愿方面存在差距。这一挑战的部分原因是，法律和软件在非常不同的细节层面上处理规则和行为。法律在其应用中必须是一般性的，因此将解释和详细要求留给软件开发人员自行决定。这就使得软件开发人员不得不决定什么是适当的技术设计，以符合通常复杂的法律的规则，而不能指望他们是法律的专家。例如，当《通用数据保护条例》（GDPR）等隐私法要求用户有权删除其数据时，这是否意味着包括备份在内的所有数据？如果没有对这些问题的明确答案，开发人员就不能确信他们已经成功地遵守了法律的要求，那么使用这些系统的公众就没有理由信任他们。该项目的创新之处在于引入设计模式，帮助软件开发人员可靠地、有目的地组装组件，使其有效地满足政策要求，从而保证公众的信心。该项目的影响以两种方式造福社会。首先，通过缩小法律和系统之间的抽象差距，本项目中开发的方法和工具帮助软件开发人员构建符合法律的义务的系统。第二，该项目促进了计算机科学和法律研究界的发展。LAChS（发音为“lox”）项目为更好地理解如何构建可问责的软件系统做出了两个贡献。首先，策略概念允许软件开发人员识别他们正在开发的系统的功能方面，以便评估系统的功能是否与他们正在执行的计算相关联的策略约束一致。沿着政策概念，该项目介绍了政策标准-法律要求的功能说明。策略概念和策略标准一起提供了一个软件工程框架，通过该框架，开发人员可以更容易地构建对法律的要求负责的系统。第二，该项目制定了一种综合的法律技术方法，用于评估一个系统在一套法律的要求方面的问责性质。以往的工作一般都试图将问责制仅仅界定为信息系统的一种属性。该项目表明，充分理解问责制需要考虑法律和计算系统的属性。总之，这项研究是基于这样一种观点，即在隐私等关键的社会优先事项方面，法律在定义数字的关键权利方面实际上取得了相当大的进展，而底层技术仍在努力适应这些挑战。因此，该项目旨在为法律的和技术方法带来更清晰的抽象、模块化和可组合性，以更好地应对这些挑战。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Society is having a hard time governing digital systems, and poorly governed systems lead to gaps in society's willingness to trust these systems with sensitive or high-priority tasks. Part of this challenge arises from the fact that law and software address rules and behavior at very different levels of detail. Laws must be general in their application and thus leave interpretation and detailed requirements to the discretion of software developers. This leaves software developers, who cannot be expected to be legal experts, having to decide what is the proper technical design to comply with often-complex legal rules. For example, when a privacy law such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires that users have a right to delete their data, does that mean all data, including backups? Without clear answers to such questions, developers can’t be confident that they have successfully complied with legal requirements, and then the public who uses these systems has little reason to trust them. This project's novelties are to introduce design patterns that help software developers assemble components reliably and purposefully, in the knowledge that they meet policy requirements effectively and thus warrant the confidence of the public. The project's impact benefits society in two ways. First, by closing the abstraction gap between law and systems, methods and tools developed in this project help software developers build systems that comply with legal obligations. Second, the project furthers the development of a research community in computer science and law. The LAChS (pronounced "lox") project makes two contributions toward better understanding of how to build accountable software systems. First, policy concepts allow software developers to identify the functional aspects of systems they are developing in order to assess whether the functions of the system are consistent with the policy constraints associated with the computations they are performing. Along with policy concepts, the project introduces policy standards -- functional descriptions of the requirements of law. Together, policy concepts and policy standards provide a software-engineering framework through which developers can more easily build systems that are accountable to legal requirements. Second, the project develops an integrated legal-technical methodology for assessing the accountability properties of a system with respect to a set of legal requirements. Prior work has generally sought to define accountability solely as a property of information systems. The project shows that a full understanding of accountability requires considering the properties of both law and computing systems. In sum, this research is premised on the view that, with respect to key societal priorities such as privacy, the law has actually made considerable progress in defining key rights for the digital, while underlying technology is still struggling to adapt to these challenges. Thus the project aims to bring more clear abstraction, modularization and composability to legal and technical methodologies in order to better meet these challenges.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.