A core calculus for provenance

DOI10.1007/978-3-642-28641-4_22MaRDI QIDQ2894337zbMATH OpenOpenAlexDBLPWikidataFDO

Authors Umut A. Acar, Amal Ahmed, James Cheney, Roly Perera

Publication date 29 June 2012

Published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.6299

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Theory of programming languages (68N15) Mathematical aspects of software engineering (specification, verification, metrics, requirements, etc.) (68N30) Authentication, digital signatures and secret sharing (94A62)

Abstract: Provenance is an increasing concern due to the ongoing revolution in sharing and processing scientific data on the Web and in other computer systems. It is proposed that many computer systems will need to become provenance-aware in order to provide satisfactory accountability, reproducibility, and trust for scientific or other high-value data. To date, there is not a consensus concerning appropriate formal models or security properties for provenance. In previous work, we introduced a formal framework for provenance security and proposed formal definitions of properties called disclosure and obfuscation. In this article, we study refined notions of positive and negative disclosure and obfuscation in a concrete setting, that of a general-purpose programing language. Previous models of provenance have focused on special-purpose languages such as workflows and database queries. We consider a higher-order, functional language with sums, products, and recursive types and functions, and equip it with a tracing semantics in which traces themselves can be replayed as computations. We present an annotation-propagation framework that supports many provenance views over traces, including standard forms of provenance studied previously. We investigate some relationships among provenance views and develop some partial solutions to the disclosure and obfuscation problems, including correct algorithms for disclosure and positive obfuscation based on trace slicing.

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Cited in

(10)

• Provenance and privacy
• Adaptable Traces for Program Explanations
• Principles of Distributed Systems
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 2080480 (Why is no real title available?)
• A framework for provenance-preserving history distribution and incremental reduction
• Provenance propagation in complex queries
• Toward a theory of self-explaining computation
• Tracing where and who provenance in linked data: a calculus
• On the Chase for All Provenance Paths with Existential Rules
• Causality and the semantics of provenance

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