A survey of accountability in computer networks and distributed systems

Abstract

Security in computer systems has been a major concern since the very beginning. Although security has been addressed in various aspects, accountability is one of the main facets of security that is lacking in today's computer systems. The ability not only to detect errors but also to find the responsible entity/entities for the failure is crucial. In this paper, we intend to provide a comprehensive investigation of the state‐of‐the‐art accountability research issues in current information systems. Also, we study the various accountability tactics that are available and how each one of them contributes to providing strong accountability of different aspects. Finally, we examine the various merits and tradeoffs. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

CoCon: A Conference Management System with Formally Verified Document Confidentiality

“…To complement these, we formulated traceback properties, stating that users cannot improperly fire the triggers. There is an analogy between traceback and accountability properties [80]: Say a certain situation occurs (e.g., a role acquisition), which could represent an "abuse"; our traceback property identifies the actions that have led to that, which also contain information about the "responsible" parties.…”

Accountability for data protection

“…Several articles already mention the limits of the pure security approach (for instance [19]) and suggest to rely on the concept of accountability. Thus, there is a recent interest and active researches for accountability which overlap several domains like security [19,20,21], language representation [22,13], auditing systems [8,23], evidence collection [15,14] and so on. However, only few of them consider an interdisciplinary view of accountability taking into account legal and business aspects.…”

Towards a Unified Model of Accountability Infrastructures

“…Suggesting accountability as a mechanism to ensure privacy was also the result of the PATS EU project and is detailed in a book edited by Guagnin et al [6]. Xiao et al [17] provide a survey of accountability in computer networks and distributed systems. Finally, Papanikolaou and Pearson [12] summarize the understanding of the term accountability in different fields and contexts.…”