A Novel Accountable Data Transfer Protocol within A Malicious Environment

Abstract

In today’s era, information leakage is one of the most serious threats to companies. A data owner sends secret or confidential information to a group of trusted agents. Some ofthe information is lost and found in an inappropriate place. Thus data is leaked. Data leakage means data distributed by the data owner is leaked by one or more agents. This causes a huge harm to the business. The distributor must assess whether data is leaked from one or more agents. To improve the probability of identifying leakages data allocation strategies (across the agents) are used. A data lineage framework is used for identifying a guilty entity. The digital watermarking is a technique in which vital information is kept hidden in the original data for protecting unauthorized duplication and distribution of data. An accountable data transfer protocol is built using oblivious transfer, robust watermarking, and signature primitives. In some occasions fake data records are injected in order to improve detecting data loss and identifying the guilty entity. The data sent by the data owner must be protected, secret and it must not be regenerated. The framework of data lineage is considered for transmission of data and is a key step towards achieving accountability.