English

VAMS: Verifiable Auditing of Access to Confidential Data

Cryptography and Security 2023-05-05 v5

Abstract

We propose VAMS, a system that enables transparency for audits of access to data requests without compromising the privacy of parties in the system. VAMS supports audits on an aggregate level and an individual level, by relying on three mechanisms. A tamper-evident log provides integrity for the log entries that are audited. A tagging scheme allows users to query log entries that relate to them, without allowing others to do so. MultiBallot, a novel extension of the ThreeBallot voting scheme, is used to generate a synthetic dataset that can be used to publicly verify published statistics with a low expected privacy loss. We evaluate two implementations of VAMS, and show that both the log and the ability to verify published statistics are practical for realistic use cases such as access to healthcare records and law enforcement access to communications records.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.04772,
  title  = {VAMS: Verifiable Auditing of Access to Confidential Data},
  author = {Alexander Hicks and Vasilios Mavroudis and Mustafa Al-Bassam and Sarah Meiklejohn and Steven J. Murdoch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.04772},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Slight update on the original work paper from 2018