Provenance for an application can provide important insights about the behavior and life cycle of the application. However, currently, there are no provenance management systems which collect and preserve provenance records securely for the applications running in a virtual machine hosted on the cloud. Moreover, the black-box nature of clouds and the possibility of cloud providers being malicious can make the secure application provenance management challenging. In this paper, we analyze the threats on trustworthy application provenance in the context of clouds while considering the collusion between users and cloud providers. Based on this threat model, we present the SECure Application Provenance (SECAP) scheme, which ensures the required integrity and confidentiality properties for application provenance efficiently. We evaluate the performance of the SECAP scheme on an OpenStack-based cloud. The experimental results suggest that SECAP performs better than several other state-of-the-art secure provenance schemes in terms of time and space requirements.
['Shams Zawoad', 'Ragib Hasan']
SECAP: Towards Securing Application Provenance in the Cloud