Privacy Issues in Scientific Workflow Provenance

Abstract

A scientific workflow often deals with proprietary modules as well as private or confidential data, such as health or medical information. Hence providing exact answers to provenance queries over all executions of the workflow may reveal private information. In this paper we first study the potential privacy issues in a scientific workflow – module privacy, data privacy, and provenance privacy, and frame several natural questions: (i) can we formally analyze module, data or provenance privacy giving provable privacy guarantees for an unlimited/bounded number of provenance queries? (ii) how can we answer provenance queries, providing as much information as possible to the user while still guaranteeing the required privacy? Then we look at module privacy in detail and propose a formal model from our recent work in [11]. Finally we point to several directions for future work