The case of the fake Picasso: preventing history forgery with secure provenance

TLDR

Provenance tracking is increasingly vital for protecting rights, ensuring compliance, and authenticating data across science, medicine, commerce, and government. The paper demonstrates how to provide strong integrity and confidentiality assurances for data provenance information. The authors present a provenance‑aware prototype that tracks data writes at the application layer, enabling easy deployment. Empirical tests show that the approach incurs only 1–13 % runtime overhead on typical real‑life workloads.

Abstract

As increasing amounts of valuable information are produced and persist digitally, the ability to determine the origin of data becomes important. In science, medicine, commerce, and government, data provenance tracking is essential for rights protection, regulatory compliance, management of intelligence and medical data, and authentication of information as it flows through workplace tasks. In this paper, we show how to provide strong integrity and confidentiality assurances for data provenance information. We describe our provenance-aware system prototype that implements provenance tracking of data writes at the application layer, which makes it extremely easy to deploy. We present empirical results that show that, for typical real-life workloads, the run-time overhead of our approach to recording provenance with confidentiality and integrity guarantees ranges from 1%-13%.