Trade-offs in Automatic Provenance Capture

Automatic provenance capture from arbitrary applications is a challenging problem. Different approaches to tackle this problem have evolved, most notably a. system-event trace analysis, b. compile-time static instrumentation, and c. taint flow analysis using dynamic binary instrumentation. Each of these approaches offers different trade-offs in terms of the granularity of captured provenance, integration requirements, and runtime overhead. While these aspects have been discussed separately, a systematic and detailed study, quantifying and elucidating them, is still lacking. To fill this gap, we begin to explore these trade-offs for representative examples of these approaches for automatic provenance capture by means of evaluation and measurement. We base our evaluation on UnixBench—a widely used benchmark suite within systems research. We believe this approach will make our results easier to compare with future studies