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Provenance-based data traceability model and policy enforcement framework for cloud services

In the context of software, provenance holds the key to retaining a reproduceable instance of the duration of a service, which can be replayed/reproduced from the beginning. This entails the nature of invocations that took place, how/where the data were created, modified, updated and the user's engagement with the service. With the emergence of the cloud and the benefits it encompasses, there has been a rapid proliferation of services being developed and adopted by commercial businesses. However, these services expose very little internal workings to their customers, and insufficient means to check for the right working order. This can cause transparency and compliance issues, especially in the event of a fault or violation, customers and providers are left to point finger at each other. Provenance-based traceability provides a means to address a part of this problem by being able to capture and query events that have occurred in the past to understand how and why it took place. On top of that, provenance-based policies are required to facilitate the validation and enforcement of business level requirements for end-users satisfaction. This dissertation makes four contributions to the state of the art: i) By defining and implementing an enhanced provenance-based cloud traceability model (cProv), that extends the standardized Prov model to support characteristics related to cloud services. The model is then able to conceptualize the traceability of a running cloud service. ii) By the creation of a provenance-based policy language (cProvl) in order to facilitate the declaration and enforcement of the business level requirements. iii) By developing a traceability framework, that provides client and server-side stacks for integrating service-level traceability and policy-based enforcement of business rules. iv) Finally by the implementation and evaluation of the framework, that leverages on the standardized industry solutions. The framework is then applied to the commercial service: 'ConfidenShare' as a proof of concept.