Provenance security guarantee from origin up to now in the e-Science environment

The e-Science environment provides science researchers with an online laboratory. Objects, including research data and related information, are transferred and shared in electronic form easily in an e-Science environment. Provenance, as a complete record of the changes applied to an object, provides a basis to trust an object. At this point, this paper proposes the "Provenance Security from Origin up to Now (PSecON)" scheme to solve the problem of how to trust provenance which is used for object trust. Through PSecON, while tracing the real source of an object transferred between e-Science environments, researchers can ensure the integrity of the object and its provenance, and confirm its actual origin. PSecON satisfies transparent audits and audit availability as well as the confidentiality and privacy of data and its provenance. These are provided by the history pool as an open board and by information hashing, respectively. PSecON supports forgery prevention and detection for provenance as well via two-way certification. Moreover, PSecON is scalable and ensures efficient and fast tracking of provenance. Based on the detailed description of PSecON in the e-Science domain, this paper demonstrates the soundness of PSecON to ensure provenance security and its easy applicability to real-world systems by analyzing the time, space and transmission overhead. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.