  Intentional or unintentional leakage of confidential data is undoubtedly one
of the most severe security threats that organizations face in the digital era.
The threat now extends to our personal lives: a plethora of personal
information is available to social networks and smartphone providers and is
indirectly transferred to untrustworthy third party and fourth party
applications.
  In this work, we present a generic data lineage framework LIME for data flow
across multiple entities that take two characteristic, principal roles (i.e.,
owner and consumer). We define the exact security guarantees required by such a
data lineage mechanism toward identification of a guilty entity, and identify
the simplifying non repudiation and honesty assumptions. We then develop and
analyze a novel accountable data transfer protocol between two entities within
a malicious environment by building upon oblivious transfer, robust
watermarking, and signature primitives. Finally, we perform an experimental
evaluation to demonstrate the practicality of our protocol.
