1 research outputs found
Blockchain-Based, Confidentiality-Preserving Orchestration of Collaborative Workflows
Business process collaboration between independent parties can be
challenging, especially if the participants do not have complete trust in each
other. Tracking actions and enforcing the activity authorizations of
participants via blockchain-hosted smart contracts is an emerging solution to
this lack of trust, with most state-of-the-art approaches generating the
orchestrating smart contract logic from BPMN models. However, as a significant
drawback in comparison to centralized business process orchestration, smart
contract state typically leaks potentially sensitive information about the
state of the collaboration.
We describe a novel approach where the process manager smart contract only
stores cryptographic commitments to the state and checks zero-knowledge proofs
on update proposals. We cover a representative subset of BPMN, support message
passing commitments between participants and provide an open-source end-to-end
implementation. Under our approach, no party external to the collaboration can
gain trustable knowledge of the current state of a process instance (barring
collusion with a participant), even if it has full access to the blockchain
history