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Provenance: Privacy and Security

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Confidentiality; Integrity; Lineage; Origin

Definition

Data provenance is information about the origins of data and its movement between databases and processes. It can be used to understand and debug the process by which data was obtained and transformed, to ensure reproducibility of results, and to establish trust. Provenance therefore has implications for both the security and privacy of the associated data. As metadata, there are also security and privacy concerns associated with provenance itself, including the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of provenance information.

Historical Background

Tracking the provenance of data within a system includes (i) capturing metadata associated with raw data that is input to the system and (ii) details of computations that transform the raw data to create new information, e.g., the sequence of steps or processes, parameter settings (in a program), and inputs and outputs of each step. Queries over provenance typically answer...

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Recommended Reading*

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Susan B. Davidson

  2. Department of Computer Science, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Sudeepa Roy

Authors
  1. Susan B. Davidson
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  2. Sudeepa Roy
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Susan B. Davidson .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

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Davidson, S.B., Roy, S. (2018). Provenance: Privacy and Security. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_80748

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