Paper: Challenges for Provenance in Cloud Computing

Challenges for Provenance in Cloud Computing

Abstract:

Many applications which require provenance are now moving to cloud infrastructures. However, it is not widely realised that clouds have their own need for provenance due to their dynamic nature and the burden this places on their administrators. We analyse the structure of cloud computing to identify the unique challenges facing provenance collection and the scenarios in which additional provenance data could be useful.

Information:

Paper by Imad M. Abbadi and John Lyle - Proceedings of the Third USENIX Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Provenance (TaPP 2011) - PDF Download

Brief Discussion:

Within this paper, the authors try to identify the unique challenges facing provenance information in cloud environments. This is a very important topic which will definitively receive more attention during the next years since incidents/forensics in such environments will also become more important.

Though the paper is short, it discusses the specific challenges of provenance data in the cloud very well. The authors propose that all layers, sub-layers and groups of a cloud system should incorporate a mechanism to support the collection of linkable data providing the provenance of events related to a specific activity. This sounds good – however it is not discussed how this shall be achieved.

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