Using provenance for secure data fusion in cooperative systems

In the context of cooperative systems, data coming from multiple, autonomous, heterogeneous information sources, is processed and fused into new pieces of information that can be further processed by other entities participating in the cooperation. Controlling the access to such evolving and variegated data, often under the authority of different entities, is challenging. In this work, we identify a set of access control requirements for multi-source cooperative systems and propose an attribute-based access control model where provenance information is used to specify access constraints that account for both the evolution of data objects and the process of data fusion. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model by showing how it can be implemented within existing access control mechanisms with minimal changes.