As increasing amounts of valuable information are produced and persist digitally, the ability to determine the origin of data becomes important. In science, medicine, commerce, and government, data provenance tracking is essential for rights protection, regulatory compliance, management of intelligence and medical data, and authentication of information as it flows through workplace tasks. While significant research has been conducted in this area, the associated security and privacy issues have not been explored, leaving provenance information vulnerable to illicit alteration as it passes through untrusted environments.In this article, we show how to provide strong integrity and confidentiality assurances for data provenance information at the kernel, file system, or application layer. We describe Sprov, our provenance-aware system prototype that implements provenance tracking of data writes at the application layer, which makes Sprov extremely easy to deploy. We present empirical results that show that, for real-life workloads, the runtime overhead of Sprov for recording provenance with confidentiality and integrity guarantees ranges from 1% to 13%, when all file modifications are recorded, and from 12% to 16%, when all file read and modifications are tracked. This is an expanded version of a paper presented at the 7th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST), Hasan et al. [2009]. R. Hasan and M. ACM Reference Format:Hasan, R., Sion, R., and Winslett, M. 2009. Preventing history forgery with secure provenance.

Abstract-TrustedDB is an outsourced database prototype that allows clients to execute SQL queries with privacy and under regulatory compliance constraints without having to trust the service provider. TrustedDB achieves this by leveraging server-hosted tamper-proof trusted hardware in critical query processing stages.TrustedDB does not limit the query expressiveness of supported queries. And, despite the cost overhead and performance limitations of trusted hardware, the costs per query are orders of magnitude lower than any (existing or) potential future software-only mechanisms. TrustedDB is built and runs on actual hardware, and its performance and costs are evaluated here. I. OVERVIEWOutsourcing has finally arrived, due in no small part to the availability of cheap high speed networks, storage and CPUs. Clients can now minimize their management overheads and virtually eliminate infrastructure costs Virtually all major "cloud" providers today offer a database service of some kind as part of their overall solution. Numerous startups also feature more targeted data management and/or database platforms.Yet, significant challenges lie in the path of large-scale adoption. Such services often require their customers to inherently trust the provider with full access to the outsourced datasets. But numerous instances of illicit insider behavior or data leaks have left clients reluctant to place sensitive data under the control of a remote, third-party provider, without practical assurances of privacy and confidentiality -especially in business, healthcare and government frameworks. And today's privacy guarantees of such services are at best declarative and subject customers to unreasonable fine-print clauses -e.g., allowing the server operator (or malicious attackers gaining access to its systems) to use customer behavior and content for commercial, profiling, or governmental surveillance purposes [5,6].Existing research addresses several such outsourcing security aspects, including access privacy, searches on encrypted data, range queries, and aggregate queries. To achieve privacy, in most of these efforts data is encrypted before outsourcing. Once encrypted however, inherent limitations in the types of primitive operations that can be performed on encrypted data lead to fundamental expressiveness and practicality constraints.Recent theoretical cryptography results provide hope by proving the existence of universal homomorphisms, i.e., encryption mechanisms that allow computation of arbitrary functions without decrypting the inputs [12]. Unfortunately actual instances of such mechanisms seem to be decades away from being practical [7].Ideas have also been proposed to leverage tamper-proof hardware to privately process data server-side, ranging from smartcard deployment [9] in healthcare, to more general database operations [3,8,10].Yet, common wisdom so far has been that trusted hardware is generally impractical due to its performance limitations and higher acquisition costs. As a result, with very few exceptions [9]...

Abstract-In this paper, we introduce a solution for relational database content rights protection through watermarking. Rights protection for relational data is of ever-increasing interest, especially considering areas where sensitive, valuable content is to be outsourced. A good example is a data mining application, where data is sold in pieces to parties specialized in mining it. Different avenues are available, each with its own advantages and drawbacks. Enforcement by legal means is usually ineffective in preventing theft of copyrighted works, unless augmented by a digital counterpart, for example, watermarking. While being able to handle higher level semantic constraints, such as classification preservation, our solution also addresses important attacks, such as subset selection and random and linear data changes. We introduce wmdb.*, a proof-of-concept implementation and its application to real-life data, namely, in watermarking the outsourced Wal-Mart sales data that we have available at our institute.

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Abstract:Sensitive information is present on our phones, disks, watches and computers. Its protection is essential. Plausible deniability of stored data allows individuals to deny that their device contains a piece of sensitive information. This constitutes a key tool in the fight against oppressive governments and censorship. Unfortunately, existing solutions, such as the now defunct TrueCrypt [5], can defend only against an adversary that can access a user's device at most once ("single-snapshot adversary"). Recent solutions have traded significant performance overheads for the ability to handle more powerful adversaries able to access the device at multiple points in time ("multi-snapshot adversary"). In this paper we show that this sacrifice is not necessary. We introduce and build DataLair 1 , a practical plausible deniability mechanism. When compared with existing approaches, DataLair is two orders of magnitude faster for public data accesses, and 5 times faster for hidden data accesses. An important component in DataLair is a new write-only ORAM construction which improves on the complexity of the state of the art write-only ORAM by a factor of O(logN ), where N denotes the underlying storage disk size.