Blockchain-based controlled information sharing in inter-organizational workflows

Abstract

Nowadays, organizations need to set higher and higher business goals in order to cope with market requirements. Indeed, a widespread strategy for organizations is to join in inter-organizational processes, which set collaborations and resource sharing among involved organizations. However, the possible lack of trust among the organizations poses relevant issues on the processing of sensitive resources. A promising approach to cope with this issue is leveraging on blockchain technology. Thanks to its design and consensus algorithm, blockchain provides a trustworthy infrastructure that allows partners involved in the collaboration to monitor and perform audits on the workflow transitions. In general, the focus of the existing blockchain-based workflow management solutions is mainly workflow coordination. However, a challenging characteristic of some workflows is that they require the exchange of a big amount of data that has to be managed off-chain, that is, directly exchanged between data producer and consumer. This off-chain data sharing should be secured and controlled such to follow the workflow execution.To cope with this challenge, in this paper, we propose a controlled information sharing in inter-organizational workflows enforced via smart contracts. Smart contracts are designed to coordinate the workflow execution, as well as to deploy a set of authorizations granting access only to the task executor and only to those resources needed for task execution and only during the task activation. We have also run a set of experiments to show the feasibility of our approach.