# A Perfect Match: Converging and Automating Privacy and Security Impact Assessment On-the-Fly
###### Abstract  
As the upsurge of information and communication technologies has become the foundation of all modern application domains, fueled by the unprecedented amount of data being processed and exchanged, besides security concerns, there are also pressing privacy considerations that come into play. Compounding this issue, there is currently a documented gap between the cybersecurity and privacy risk assessment (RA) avenues, which are treated as distinct management processes and capitalise on rather rigid and make-like approaches. In this paper, we aim to combine the best of both worlds by proposing the APSIA (Automated Privacy and Security Impact Assessment) methodology, which stands for Automated Privacy and Security Impact Assessment. APSIA is powered by the use of interdependency graph models and data processing flows used to create a digital reflection of the cyber-physical environment of an organisation. Along with this model, we present a novel and extensible privacy risk scoring system for quantifying the privacy impact triggered by the identified vulnerabilities of the ICT infrastructure of an organisation. We provide a prototype implementation and demonstrate its applicability and efficacy through a specific case study in the context of a heavily regulated sector (i.e., assistive healthcare domain) where strict security and privacy considerations are not only expected but mandated so as to better showcase the beneficial characteristics of APSIA. Our approach can complement any existing security-based RA tool and provide the means to conduct an enhanced, dynamic and generic assessment as an integral part of an iterative and unified risk assessment process on-the-fly. Based on our findings, we posit open issues and challenges, and discuss possible ways to address them, so that such holistic security and privacy mechanisms can reach their full potential towards solving this conundrum. Privacy Impact Assessment; General Data Protection Regulation; privacy scoring system; privacy quantification; healthcare data privacy +
Footnote †: journal: _Future Internet_  
0000-0001-999-2270-3000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-0000-00000-0  
Cybersecurity (ENISA), in the face of an increasing attack landscape (Figure 1), it is imperative to ensure the correct and safe operation of all safety-critical business processes because, by their very nature, the internal physical and cyber (data and computing) assets--of an ecosystem or application domain--may not always be in trusted custody. Towards this direction, organizations must perform risk management so that they can identify and assess risks in order to keep them at acceptable levels. It serves as the foundation on which organizations can start building a well-rounded cybersecurity strategy. In this context, the most fundamental component of risk management is risk assessment. Risk assessment targets the identification of threats and of respective risk levels, thus, allowing for the overall risk management to keep cybersecurity risks under an acceptable threshold [4]. According to the Risk Management Framework (RMF) proposed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), risk assessment can be performed in three tiers: the organizational; business process; and Information Systems tier [3]. In the era where \"service is everything and everything is a service\", this risk compartmentalization enables the emerging trend of the intelligent edge computing and the backend information service provider to operate in tandem, so as to provide flexible design choices that best meet business and operational goals. However, as the upsurge of such information and communication technologies has become the nervous system of all modern economies, fueled by the unprecedented amount of personal data being processed and exchanged [5], besides security concerns, there are also pressing privacy considerations that come into play and need to be taken into consideration.