fast07-audit

Design and Implementation of†Verifiable Audit Trails for a Versioning File SystemZachary N. J. Peterson Randal Burns Giuseppe AtenieseJohns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins UniversityStephen BonoJohns Hopkins UniversityAbstract data requirements for audit trails, but cannot be used forverification. Technologies such as continuous version-We present constructs that create, manage, and verifying file systems [14, 22, 33, 27, 39] and provenance-digital audit trails for versioning file systems. Basedaware storage systems [26] may be employed in orderupon a small amount of data published to a third party, ato construct and query a data history. All changes tofile system commits to a version history. At a later date,data are recorded and the system provides access to thean auditor uses the published data to verify the contentsrecords through time-oriented file system interfaces [31].of the file system at any point in time. Digital audit trailsHowever, for verification, past versions of data must becreate an analog of the paper audit process for file data,immutable. While such systems may prevent writes tohelping to meet the requirements of electronic recordspast versions by policy, histories may be changed unde-legislation. Our techniques address the I/O and computa-tectably (see Section 3).tional efficiency of generating and verifying audit trails,The digital audit parallels paper audits in process andthe aggregation of audit ...