Engineering access control policies for provenance-aware systems

Abstract

Provenance is meta-data about how data items become what they are. A variety of provenance-aware access control models and policy languages have been recently discussed in the literature. However, the issue of eliciting access control requirements related to provenance and of elaborating them as provenance-aware access control policies (ACPs) has received much less attention. This paper explores the approach to engineering provenance-aware ACPs since the beginning of software development. Specifically, this paper introduces a typed provenance model (TPM) to abstract complex provenance graph and presents a TPM-centric process for identification, specification, and refinement of provenance-aware ACPs. We illustrate this process by means of a homework grading system.