A file provenance system

Abstract

A file provenance system supports the automatic collection and management of provenance i.e. the complete processing history of a data object. File system level provenance provides functionality unavailable in the existing provenance systems. In this paper, we discuss the design objectives for a flexible and efficient file provenance system and then propose the design of such a system, called FiPS. We design FiPS as a thin stackable file system for capturing provenance in a portable manner. FiPS can capture provenance at various degrees of granularity, can transform provenance records into secure information, and can direct the resulting provenance data to various persistent storage systems.