Scientific Workflow Provenance Querying with Security Views

Abstract

Provenance, the metadata that pertains to the derivation history of a data product, has become increasingly important in scientific workflow environments. In many cases, both data products and their provenance can be sensitive and effective access control mechanisms are essential to protect their confidentiality. In this paper, we propose i) a formalization of scientific workflow provenance as the basis for querying and access control; ii) a security specification mechanism for provenance at various granularity levels and the derivation of a full security specification based on inheritance, overriding, and conflict resolution rules; iii) a formalization of security views that are derived from a scientific workflow run provenance for different roles of users; and iv) a framework that integrates abstraction views and security views such that a user can examine provenance at different abstraction levels while respecting the security policy prescribed for her. We have developed the SecProv prototype to validate the effectiveness of our approach.