Feb 2018: SmartProvenance: A Distributed, Blockchain Based Data Provenance

Blockchain technology has evolved from being an immutable ledger of transactions for cryptocurrencies to a programmable interactive environment for building distributed reliable applications. Although the blockchain technology has been used to address various challenges, to our knowledge none of the previous work focused on using Blockchain to develop a secure and immutable scientific data provenance management framework that automatically verifies the provenance records using off-chain techniques. In this talk, we discuss how we leverage Blockchain as a platform to facilitate trustworthy data provenance collection, verification, and management. The developed system utilizes smart contracts and open provenance model (OPM) to record immutable data trails. We show that our proposed framework can securely capture and validate provenance data that prevents any malicious modification to the captured data as long as the majority of the participants are honest.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu is a Professor in the Computer Science Department and Director of the Data Security and Privacy Lab at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD). Dr. Kantarcioglu’s research focuses on the integration of cyber security and data science.Presentations are recorded and include time for questions with the audience.