GovernR: Provenance and Confidentiality Guarantees In Research Data Repositories

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.