Sesame: Practical End-to-End Privacy Compliance with Policy Containers and Privacy Regions

Web applications are governed by privacy policies, but developers lack practical abstractions to ensure that their code actually abides by these policies. This leads to frequent oversights, bugs, and costly privacy violations.

Sesame is a practical framework for end-to-end privacy policy enforcement. Sesame wraps data in policy containers that associate data with policies that govern its use. Policy containers force developers to use privacy regions when operating on the data, and Sesame combines sandboxing and a novel static analysis to prevent privacy regions from leaking data. Sesame enforces a policy check before externalizing data, and it supports custom I/O via reviewed, signed code.

Experience with four web applications shows that Sesame's automated guarantees cover 95% of application code, with the remaining 5% needing manual review. Sesame achieves this with reasonable application developer effort and imposes 3-10% performance overhead (10-55% with sandboxes).