How to Track Your Data: The Case for Cloud Computing Provenance

Provenance, a meta-data describing the derivation history of data, is crucial for the uptake of cloud computing to enhance reliability, credibility, accountability, transparency, and confidentiality of digital objects in a cloud. In this paper, we survey current mechanisms that support provenance for cloud computing, we classify provenance according to its granularities encapsulating the various sets of provenance data for different use cases, and we summarize the challenges and requirements for collecting provenance in a cloud, based on which we show the gap between current approaches to requirements. Additionally, we propose our approach, Data PROVE, that aims to effectively and efficiently satisfy those challenges and requirements in cloud provenance, and to provide a provenance supplemented cloud for better integrity and safety of customers' data.