RuleKeeper: GDPR-Aware Personal Data Compliance for Web Frameworks

Pressured by existing regulations such as the EU GDPR, online services must advertise a personal data protection policy declaring the types and purposes of collected personal data, which must then be strictly enforced as per the consent decisions made by the users. However, due to the lack of system-level support, obtaining strong guarantees of policy enforcement is hard, leaving the door open for software bugs and vulnerabilities to cause GDPR-compliance violations.We present RuleKeeper, a GDPR-aware personal data policy compliance system for web development frameworks. Currently ported for the MERN framework, RuleKeeper allows web developers to specify a GDPR manifest from which the data protection policy of the web application is automatically generated and is transparently enforced through static code analysis and runtime access control mechanisms. GDPR compliance is checked in a cross-cutting manner requiring few changes to the application code. We used our prototype implementation to evaluate RuleKeeper with four real-world applications. Our system can model realistic GDPR data protection requirements, adds modest performance overheads to the web application, and can detect GDPR violation bugs.