From Here to Provtopia

Valuable, sensitive, and regulated data flow freely through distributed systems. In such a world, how can systems plausibly comply with the regulations governing the collection, use, and management of such data? We claim that distributed data provenance, the directed acyclic graph documenting the origin and transformations of data holds the key. Provenance analysis has already been demonstrated in a wide range of applications: from intrusion detection to performance analysis. We describe how similar systems and analysis techniques are suitable both for implementing the complex policies that govern data and verifying compliance with regulatory mandates. We also highlight the challenges to be addressed to move provenance from research laboratories to production systems.