A provenance auditing framework for cloud computing systems

Cloud computing is a service oriented paradigm that aims at sharing resources among a massive number of tenants and users. This sharing facility that it provides coupled with the sheer number of users make cloud environments susceptible to major security risks. Hence, security and auditing of cloud systems is of great relevance. Provenance is a meta-data history of objects which aid in verifiability, accountability and lineage tracking. Incorporating provenance to cloud systems can help in fault detection. This paper proposes a framework which aims at performing secure provenance audit of clouds across applications and multiple guest operating systems. For integrity preservation and verification, we use established cryptographic techniques. We look at it from the cloud service providers´ perspective as improving cloud security can result in better trust relations with customers.