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1. Usable Cryptographic Provenance: A Proactive Complement to Fact-Checking for Mitigating Misinformation

   Sidnam-Mauch, E.; Ivancsics, B.; Monroe, A.; Washington, E.; Francis II, E.; Caine, K.; Bonneau, J.; McGregor, S.E. (June 2022, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media)

   This paper describes how cryptographic provenance can serve as a proactive, partial solution for mitigating misinformation. Drawing on literature from human-centered computing and usable security, journalism, and cryptography, we discuss the advantages and limitations of both content-based and technical approaches to the problem of online misinformation. We argue cryptographic provenance systems designed for usability can reduce the spread of misinformation by surfacing provenance information and making this information salient and acceptable to information consumers. We highlight challenges and open research areas related to designing usable cryptographic provenance systems, specifically concerning two key stakeholder groups: journalists and news consumers. 

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2. Usable News Authentication: How the Presentation and Location of Cryptographic Information Impacts the Usability of Provenance Information and Perceptions of News Articles

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642331  

   Francis_II, Errol; Barwulor, Catherine; Monroe, Ayana R; Morales, Kediel O; Potlapalli, Samya; Brown, Kimberly; Jose, Julia; Sidnam-Mauch, Emily; Mcgregor, Susan E; Caine, Kelly (May 2024, CHI '24: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

   Cryptographic tools for authenticating the provenance of web-based information are a promising approach to increasing trust in online news and information. However, making these tools’ technical assurances sufficiently usable for news consumers is essential to realizing their potential. We conduct an online study with 160 participants to investigate how the presentation (visual vs. textual) and location (on a news article page or a third-party site) of the provenance information affects news consumers’ perception of the content’s credibility and trustworthiness, as well as the usability of the tool itself. We find that although the visual presentation of provenance information is more challenging to adopt than its text-based counterpart, this approach leads its users to put more faith in the credibility and trustworthiness of digital news, especially when situated internally to the news article. 

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3. Transparency, Trust, and Security Needs for the Design of Digital News Authentication Tools

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3579534  

   Francis, Errol; Monroe, Ayana; Sidnam-Mauch, Emily; Ivancsics, Bernat; Washington, Eve; McGregor, Susan E.; Bonneau, Joseph; Caine, Kelly (April 2023, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Americans' trust in news is declining, and authenticity and transparency challenges in digital publishing contexts pose unique challenges to the ability to effectively gratify their information-seeking needs via online media. Cryptographic technologies and web-based provenance indicators have the potential to enhance the trustworthiness and transparency of digital communication, but better understandings of news consumers practices and needs are required to develop practical tools. Through a representative online survey of 400 digital news consumers and 19 follow-up interviews, we investigate how users authenticate and assign trust to news content, and identify specific needs pertaining to news transparency and authentication that could be met by digital news authentication tools. While many users currently rely on political ideology to assess news trustworthiness, we find that users of all political orientations see value in independent provenance and authentication tools for digital news. 

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4. An Interaction Provenance-based Trust Management Scheme For Connected Vehicles

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CCNC49033.2022.9700580  

   Hoque, Mohammad Aminul; Hasan, Ragib (January 2022, IEEE 19th Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC))

   Connected vehicles (CVs) have facilitated the development of intelligent transportation system that supports critical safety information sharing with minimum latency. However, CVs are vulnerable to different external and internal attacks. Though cryptographic techniques can mitigate external attacks, preventing internal attacks imposes challenges due to authorized but malicious entities. Thwarting internal attacks require identifying the trustworthiness of the participating vehicles. This paper proposes a trust management framework for CVs using interaction provenance that ensures privacy, considers both in-vehicle and vehicular network security incidents, and supports flexible security policies. For this purpose, we present an interaction provenance recording and trust management protocol. Different events are extracted from interaction provenance, and trustworthiness is calculated using fuzzy policies based on the events. 

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5. Compact, tamper-resistant archival of fine-grained provenance

   https://doi.org/10.14778/3436905.3436909  

   Zheng, Nan; Ives, Zachary G. (December 2020, Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment)

   null (Ed.)

   Data provenance tools aim to facilitate reproducible data science and auditable data analyses, by tracking the processes and inputs responsible for each result of an analysis. Fine-grained provenance further enables sophisticated reasoning about why individual output results appear or fail to appear. However, for reproducibility and auditing, we need a provenance archival system that is tamper-resistant , and efficiently stores provenance for computations computed over time (i.e., it compresses repeated results). We study this problem, developing solutions for storing fine-grained provenance in relational storage systems while both compressing and protecting it via cryptographic hashes. We experimentally validate our proposed solutions using both scientific and OLAP workloads. 

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