Abstract
Keeping audit logs about past activities in any computer system is one of the requirements regulated decades ago. However, there is no clear definition of what information should be kept in audit logs. Therefore, most existing systems include identifiers in audit records that violate data privacy, or they apply pseudonymization techniques before logging that add unnecessary overhead to the system.
In this paper, we define an auditing approach called blind auditing in which the audit logs contain just “enough” information to preserve data privacy and enable different auditing processes without adding intolerable overhead to the system being audited. With those blind audit logs, we define a probabilistic access control model that dynamically improves over time. Together, these allow auditing and access control that is performant, privacy-preserving and perpetually improving.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Ahmad, A., Saad, M., Bassiouni, M., Mohaisen, A.: Towards blockchain-driven, secure and transparent audit logs. In: Proceedings of the 15th EAI International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Systems: Computing, Networking and Services, pp. 443–448 (2018)
Ardagna, C.A., Di Vimercati, S.D.C., Foresti, S., Grandison, T.W., Jajodia, S., Samarati, P.: Access control for smarter healthcare using policy spaces. Comput. Secur. 29(8), 848–858 (2010)
Ateniese, G., et al.: Provable data possession at untrusted stores. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 598–609 (2007)
Benet, J.: IPFS: content addressed, versioned, P2P file system. arXiv preprint arXiv:1407.3561 (2014)
Benjamin, A.: Audit: how to do it in practice. BMJ 336(7655), 1241–1245 (2008)
Bozorgi, A., Jadidi, M.S., Anderson, J.: Challenges in designing a distributed cryptographic file system. In: Anderson, J., Stajano, F., Christianson, B., Matyáš, V. (eds.) Security Protocols 2019. LNCS, vol. 12287, pp. 177–192. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57043-9_17
Bozorgi, A., Jadidi, M.S., Anderson, J.: UPSS: a global, least-privileged storage system with stronger security and better performance. IEEE Open J. Comput. Soc. (2022, submitted)
Chen, Y., et al.: Learning bundled care opportunities from electronic medical records. J. Biomed. Inform. 77, 1–10 (2018)
Eckert, C., Pircher, A.: Internet anonymity: problems and solutions. In: Dupuy, M., Paradinas, P. (eds.) SEC 2001. IIFIP, vol. 65, pp. 35–50. Springer, Boston, MA (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/0-306-46998-7_3
Flegel, U.: Pseudonymizing Unix log files. In: Davida, G., Frankel, Y., Rees, O. (eds.) InfraSec 2002. LNCS, vol. 2437, pp. 162–179. Springer, Heidelberg (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45831-X_12
Gehani, A., Tariq, D.: SPADE: support for provenance auditing in distributed environments. In: Narasimhan, P., Triantafillou, P. (eds.) Middleware 2012. LNCS, vol. 7662, pp. 101–120. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35170-9_6
Goldstein, I.H., Hribar, M.R., Read-Brown, S., Chiang, M.F.: Association of the presence of trainees with outpatient appointment times in an ophthalmology clinic. JAMA Ophthalmol. 136(1), 20–26 (2018)
Hossain, M.N., et al.: \(\{\)SLEUTH\(\}\): real-time attack scenario reconstruction from \(\{\)COTS\(\}\) audit data. In: 26th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 17), pp. 487–504 (2017)
Hribar, M.R., et al.: Secondary use of electronic health record data for clinical workflow analysis. J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 25(1), 40–46 (2018)
Juels, A., Kaliski Jr, B.S.: Pors: proofs of retrievability for large files. In: Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 584–597 (2007)
La Porta, R., Lopez-de Silanes, F., Shleifer, A., Vishny, R.W.: Legal determinants of external finance. J. Financ. 52(3), 1131–1150 (1997)
Latham, D.C.: Department of defense trusted computer system evaluation criteria. Department of Defense 198 (1986)
Microsoft learn: Event Tracking for Windows (ETW) (2022). https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/event-tracing-for-windows-etw-
Pattengale, N.D., Hudson, C.M.: Decentralized genomics audit logging via permissioned blockchain ledgering. BMC Med. Genom. 13(7), 1–9 (2020)
Power, M.: The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification. OUP, Oxford (1997)
Power, M.: The audit society-second thoughts. Int. J. Audit. 4(1), 111–119 (2000)
Rachmawati, D., Tarigan, J., Ginting, A.: A comparative study of message digest 5 (MD5) and sha256 algorithm. J. Phys. Conf. Ser. 978, 012116 (2018). IOP Publishing
Rostad, L., Edsberg, O.: A study of access control requirements for healthcare systems based on audit trails from access logs. In: 2006 22nd Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC’06), pp. 175–186. IEEE (2006)
Rule, A., Chiang, M.F., Hribar, M.R.: Using electronic health record audit logs to study clinical activity: a systematic review of aims, measures, and methods. J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 27(3), 480–490 (2020)
Sandhu, R.S., Samarati, P.: Access control: principle and practice. IEEE Commun. Mag. 32(9), 40–48 (1994)
Shah, M.A., Baker, M., Mogul, J.C., Swaminathan, R., et al.: Auditing to keep online storage services honest. In: HotOS (2007)
Shah, M.A., Swaminathan, R., Baker, M.: Privacy-preserving audit and extraction of digital contents. Cryptology ePrint Archive (2008)
Sutton, A., Samavi, R.: Blockchain enabled privacy audit logs. In: d’Amato, C., et al. (eds.) ISWC 2017. LNCS, vol. 10587, pp. 645–660. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68288-4_38
The FreeBSD project: auditd - The FreeBSD audit log management daemon (2022). https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=auditd &sektion=8 &manpath=FreeBSD+13.1-RELEASE+and+Ports
The OpenBSM contributers: OpenBSM: Open Source Basic Security Module (BSM) Audit Implementation (2022). https://github.com/openbsm/openbsm
Ubuntu manpage repository: auditd - The Linux Audit daemon (2019). https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/en/man8/auditd.8.html
Wang, C., Wang, Q., Ren, K., Lou, W.: Privacy-preserving public auditing for data storage security in cloud computing. In: 2010 Proceedings IEEE InfoCom, pp. 1–9. IEEE (2010)
Yu, H., Li, A., Jiang, R.: Needle in a haystack: attack detection from large-scale system audit. In: 2019 IEEE 19th International Conference on Communication Technology (ICCT), pp. 1418–1426. IEEE (2019)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bozorgi, A., Anderson, J. (2023). Blind Auditing and Probabilistic Access Controls. In: Stajano, F., Matyáš, V., Christianson, B., Anderson, J. (eds) Security Protocols XXVIII. Security Protocols 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14186. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43033-6_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43033-6_25
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-43032-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-43033-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)