GovernR: Provenance and Confidentiality Guarantees In Research Data Repositories

TL;DR

GovernR introduces cryptographic protocols to ensure data provenance and confidentiality in research repositories, providing a practical, usable tool integrated with Dataverse to address a niche but critical research data management gap.

Contribution

This paper presents a novel cryptographic framework and a practical tool, GovernR, for secure, provenance-aware research data sharing compatible with existing platforms.

Findings

GovernR effectively enforces provenance guarantees

Benchmark results show acceptable performance overhead

The tool integrates seamlessly with Dataverse

Abstract

We propose cryptographic protocols to incorporate time provenance guarantees while meeting confidentiality and controlled sharing needs for research data. We demonstrate the efficacy of these mechanisms by developing and benchmarking a practical tool, GovernR, which furthermore takes into usability issues and is compatible with a popular open-sourced research data storage platform, Dataverse. In doing so, we identify and provide a solution addressing an important gap (though applicable to only niche use cases) in practical research data management.