Provenance has become increasingly important in scientific workflows and services computing to capture the derivation history of a data product, including the original data sources, intermediate data products, and the steps that were applied to produce the data product. In many cases, both scientific results and the used protocol are sensitive and effective access control mechanisms are essential to protect their confidentiality. In this paper, we propose: 1) a formal scientific workflow provenance model as the basis for querying and access control for workflow provenance; 2) a security model for fine-grained access control for multilevel provenance and an algorithm for the derivation of a full security specification based on inheritance, overriding, and conflict resolution; 3) a formalization of the notion of security views and an algorithm for security view derivation; and 4) a formalization of the notion of secure abstraction views and an algorithm for its computation. A prototype called SecProv has been developed, and experiments show the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

Provenance, the metadata that pertains to the derivation history of a data product, has become increasingly important in scientific workflow environments. In many cases, both data products and their provenance can be sensitive and effective access control mechanisms are essential to protect their confidentiality. In this paper, we propose i) a formalization of scientific workflow provenance as the basis for querying and access control; ii) a security specification mechanism for provenance at various granularity levels and the derivation of a full security specification based on inheritance, overriding, and conflict resolution rules; iii) a formalization of security views that are derived from a scientific workflow run provenance for different roles of users; and iv) a framework that integrates abstraction views and security views such that a user can examine provenance at different abstraction levels while respecting the security policy prescribed for her. We have developed the SecProv prototype to validate the effectiveness of our approach.