Integrity management in a trusted utilitarian data exchange platform

Abstract

Utilitarian data refers to data elements that can be readily put to use by one or more stakeholders. Utility of a data element is often subjective and intertwined in the sense that, a positive utility for one stakeholder may result in a negative utility for some other stakeholder. Also, credibility of utilitarian data is often established based on the credibility of its source. For this reason, defining and managing the integrity of utilitarian data exchanges is a non-trivial problem. This paper describes the problem of integrity management in an inter-organizational utilitarian data exchange platform, and introduces a credentials-based subsystem for managing integrity. Scalability is addressed based on mechanisms of privilege percolation though containment. Formal characteristics of the proposed model are derived based on an approach of adversarial scenario-handling.