Obscuring provenance confidential information via graph transformation

Abstract

Provenance is a record that describes the people, institutions, entities, and activities involved in producing, influencing, or delivering a piece of data or a thing. In particular, the provenance of information is crucial in deciding whether information is to be trusted. PROV is a recent W3C specification for sharing provenance over the Web. However, provenance records may expose confidential information, such as identity of agents or specific attributes of entities or activities. It is therefore essential for confidential information to be obscured before sharing provenance. This paper describes PROV-GTS, a provenance graph transformation system, whose principled definition is based on PROV properties, and which seeks to avoid false independencies and false dependencies. PROV-GTS is shown to preserve graph integrity, to be terminating and to be confluent.