Security and Data Accountability in Distributed Systems: A Provenance Survey

Abstract

While provenance research is common in distributed systems, many proposed solutions do not address the security of systems and accountability of data stored in those systems. In this paper, we survey provenance solutions which were proposed to address the problems of system security and data accountability in distributed systems. From our survey, we derive a set of minimum requirements that are necessary for a provenance system to be effective in addressing the two problems. Finally, we identify several gaps in the surveyed solutions and present them as challenges that future provenance researchers should tackle. We argue that these gaps have to be addressed before a complete and fool-proof provenance solution can be arrived at in the future.