Typically, the request can be tied to the user. Again, if the user is a registered member of the customer association, then his or her request can be tied to the association as well. Consequently, requests are more likely to have some value, for instance, if I know the kind of web properties a client is interested in, then I can direct my sales effort towards clients’ interests (Crouch, et.al., 2019). Besides every client, probably every user, will not have to disclose their interaction habits as well as their web viewing with any other user. In that regard, if the user’s string of reputation requests were accessed by another client, this will be deemed a breach of privacy. Also, it may give the receiver a lot of information about the activities, habits, and interests of the individual.
Furthermore, in the case of a company, the interests of its employees may be utilized competitively to comprehend sales prospects, pricing models, future directions, customer interactions, and any other sensitive business activity. Possibly, a single customer activity might not be very significant in isolation from the rest of the company (Crouch, et.al., 2019). Nonetheless, if an attacker could obtain data about most of the employee activities, then essential data will perhaps be disclosed. For example, if several executives or researchers access the website of a fascinating new startup, then a competitor may infer that the firm was contemplating an acquisition. Any specific reputation request in isolation might not all that important, but the aggregation of those particular reputation requests can be tied back to a valuable entity.
Therefore, a reputation request has a multitenancy challenge. To ensure that attackers do not have access to customer’s request history, several measures can be taken. The first one is tossing all reputation requests once they have been satisfied. Regarding that, if all customer requests are ephemeral and if there is no reputation request history, an attacker could have a picture of the reputation requests at any specific attack moment (Crouch, et.al., 2019). Hence, it is imperative to ensure that all reputation request history is deleted.
Nonetheless, the software vendor may lose vital information concerning the efficacy of the reputation service. The reputation service will need to store metadata of reputation requests to compute log failures, performance statistics, and similar telemetry data (Crouch, et.al., 2019). Moreover, the metadata will not be available to the attackers and perhaps will not be as vital as reputation request histories which can be tied to customer’s entities of interest. Another viable security approach will be to get rid of all actual request history and then keep the metadata only.
For instance, consider a case whereby only metadata is kept, implying that no data about objects for which a reputation request has been made is kept. Moreover, critical data required by the software vendor pertaining to the running of service will be lost (Crouch, et.al., 2019). In case of an error in calculating reputation, it may not be possible to know the number of ill-informed customers. To comprehend who may be affected, the service will have to keep reputation requests for every entity.
Consequently, if a reputation request history for every user of the system is kept, then the system has a critical multitenancy challenge. Every client anticipate that her reputation request history is kept private. Numerous international jurisdictions have enacted privacy laws that postulate evidence of personal information should be kept private, and hence protected information. Compliance is indeed one driver of security posture (Zhao, et.al., 2019). In that regard, I would assert that merely to comply is a key contributor to the failure of privacy. There are other drivers of an effective security posture. Large firms, governments, and enterprises tend to view the loss of customers data as negligence of the organization, and thus everything should be done to meet all legal privacy requirements.
Having established the significance of the need to keep customer reputation request history, various approaches can be taken to implement data protection. First, encapsulate customer’s data in a manner that remains well segregated. Secondly, encrypt every data as it enters the data and then decrypt it when it exists (Zhao, et.al., 2019). Lastly, separate processing in the infrastructure. Every client receives a unique infrastructure and processing. To sum up, every organization needs to adopt security measures to protect a customer from other customers when accessing reputations.