PROV-GTS: a template-based PROV graph transformation system for obscuring provenance confidential information

Abstract

Provenance is a record that describes the people, institutions, entities, and activities involved in producing, influencing, or delivering a piece of data or a thing. Provenance can be used to trace the source of ingredients in food industry, record the intermediate and final results of scientific workflows, and follow the origin of online posts and news. Data provenance becomes a significant metadata in validating the origin of information and asserting its quality. It has been adopted in many significant domains for different purposes, for example, validating experimental results in scientific workflow systems,improving health services in healthcare, trustworthiness of data from sensor networks,and managing access control systems. In particular, the provenance of information is crucial in deciding whether information is to be trusted.

In order to establish trust and confirm the quality and originality using provenance information,it is important to share provenance among collaborators in scientific workow systems or publicly over open environments such as the Web. PROV is a recent W3C specification for sharing provenance over the Web.

However, sharing provenance may expose confidential information such as the medical history of a patient, the identity of an agent, and the bank account details of an individual.It is therefore crucial for the sensitive and confidential information of provenance data to be obscured to enable trustworthiness prior to sharing provenance in open environments such as the Web.

This research work describes PROV-GTS, a provenance graph transformation system,whose principled definition is based on PROV properties, and which seeks to preserve graph integrity by avoiding false independencies and false dependencies while obscuring restricted provenance information. The system is formally established as a template based framework and formalised using category theory concepts, such as functors, diagrams,and natural transformation. PROV-GTS is shown to preserve graph connectivity,to be terminating and to be confluent with deterministic and consistent rule applications.The performance evaluation based on real-world provenance graphs demonstrates a high connectivity preservation with minimum graph reduction.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Jamal A. Hussein: orcid.org/0000-0003-0490-5029

ORCID for Vladimiro Sassone: orcid.org/0000-0002-6432-1482

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