Introduction: Transparency of computation is a requirement for assessing the validity of computed results and research claims based upon them; and it is essential for access to, assessment, and reuse of computational components. These components may be subject to methodological or other challenges over time. While reference to archived software and/or data is increasingly common in publications, a single machine-interpretable, integrative representation of how results were derived, that supports defeasible reasoning, has been absent.
Data provenance analysis has been used as an assistive measure for ensuring system integrity. However, such techniques are typically reactive approaches to identify the root cause of an attack in its aftermath. This is in part due to the fact that the collection of provenance metadata often results in a deluge of information that cannot easily be queried and analyzed in real time. This paper presents an approach for proactively reasoning about provenance metadata within the Automatic Cryptographic Data Centric (ACDC) security architecture, a new security infrastructure in which all data interactions are considered at a coarse granularity, similar to the Function as a Service model. At this scale, we have found that data interactions are manageable for the proactive specification and evaluation of provenance policies—constraints placed on provenance metadata to prevent the consumption of untrusted data. This paper provides a model for proactively evaluating provenance metadata in the ACDC paradigm as well as a case study of an electronic voting scheme to demonstrate the applicability of ACDC and the provenance policies needed to ensure data integrity.
Software repositories contain information about source code, software development processes, and team interactions. We combine the provenance of development processes with code security analysis results to provide fast feedback on the software’s design and security issues. Results from queries of the provenance graph drives the security analysis, which are conducted on certain events—such as commits or pull requests by external contributors. We evaluate our method on Open Source projects that are developed under time pressure and use Germany’s COVID-19 contact tracing app ‘Corona-Warn-App’ as a case study.
We present here a provenance management system adapted to astronomical projects needs. We collected use cases from various astronomy projects and defined a data model in the ecosystem developed by the IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alliance). From those use cases, we observed that some projects already have data collections generated and archived, from which the provenance has to be extracted (provenance "on top"), and some projects are building complex pipelines that automatically capture provenance information during the data processing (capture "inside"). Different tools and prototypes have been developed and tested to capture, store, access and visualize the provenance information, which participate to the shaping of a full provenance management system able to handle detailed provenance information.
The duration of the life cycle in deep neural networks (DNN) depends on the data configuration decisions that lead to success in obtaining models. Analyzing hyperparameters along the evolution of the network’s execution allows for adapting the data. Provenance data derivation traces help the parameter fine-tuning by providing a global data picture with clear dependencies. Provenance can also contribute to the interpretation of models resulting from the DNN life cycle. However, there are challenges in collecting hyperparameters and in modeling the relationships between the data involved in the DNN life cycle to build a provenance database. Current approaches adopt different notions of provenance in their representation and require the execution of the DNN under a specific software framework, which limits interoperability and flexibility when choosing the DNN execution environment. This work presents a provenance data-based approach to address these challenges, proposing a collection mechanism with flexibility in the choice and representation of data to be analyzed. Experiments of the approach, using a convolutional neural network focused on image recognition, provide evidence of the flexibility, the efficiency of data collection, the analysis and the validation of network data.
