Seminar Speaker
Date Friday, March 4, 2011, 11:00 am, SB 113
Title: Forgery in the Digital Frontier: Protecting the Genealogy of Bits with Secure Provenance
Speaker: Ragib Hasan
Abstract
As increasing amounts of valuable information are produced and persist digitally, the ability to determine the origin of data becomes important. In science, medicine, commerce, and government, data provenance tracking is essential for rights protection, regulatory compliance, management of intelligence and medical data, and authentication of information as it flows through workplace tasks. Unlike physical documents, digitally stored information can be rapidly copied, erased, or tampered. The distributed nature of today's computing systems also implies that digital data may be stored in or transmitted via untrusted systems. In many cases, even insiders can have financial or strategic motives to tamper with data. In order to trust data, it is therefore useful to know its history, and to protect data history from illicit modifications. Widespread use of electronic records in high-stakes applications such as business and health-care shows that the need to ensure trustworthiness of data retention is crucial. The society as a whole will benefit significantly from the development and adoption of techniques for ensuring the integrity of data history, as such assurances will reduce costs and increase public trust on electronic records.
In this talk, I will explore techniques for providing integrity assurances for the provenance of data in an untrusted environment. I will show that it is possible to provide strong integrity assurances for data history, without incurring high performance overheads, or using costly trusted hardware. I will first focus on data provenance in file systems, and develop provably-secure schemes for securing file provenance. I will present empirical results that show that, for typical real-life workloads, the run-time overhead of our approach to recording provenance with confidentiality and integrity guarantees ranges from 1% - 13%. I will also talk briefly about my work on designing efficient audits of database transaction history and TLOW: our high-performance, tamper-evident database architecture. I will also discuss the difficulties of securing data provenance in different application domains such as cloud computing and provide a guideline for future work.
Biography
Dr. Ragib Hasan is an NSF/CRA Computing Innovation Fellow and Assistant Research Scientist at the Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University. He is a member of the Hopkins Storage Systems Lab. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in October, 2009, and December, 2005, respectively, under the supervision of Professor Marianne Winslett. Before that, he received a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Engineering and graduated summa cum laude from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 2003.
Dr. Hasan's research interest falls in the general area of data security, with emphasis on trustworthy data history, provenance, and accountability for cloud computing, file systems, and databases. He is also interested in secure social networking, trustworthy location based services, and secure medical devices. Hasan is the recipient of the 2009 NSF Computing Innovation Fellowship and the 2003 Chancellor Award and Gold Medal from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. He is also an active Wikipedia editor, and an administrator in both the English and Bengali language Wikipedias. His work in Wikipedia has been covered by the BBC and the Deutsche-Welle World Service. Website: http://www.ragibhasan.com