Balancing Confidentiality and Transparency for Blockchain-based Process-Aware Information Systems

2024-12-07

arXiv.org

AI Summary

Addressing the challenge of balancing transparency and confidentiality in blockchain-based process-aware information systems (PAIS), this paper proposes CONFETTY—a novel architecture that enables verifiable process transparency while enforcing dynamic, fine-grained access control over sensitive data. CONFETTY achieves this by executing standardized business logic via smart contracts and integrating attribute-based encryption (ABE) for confidentiality-preserving data sharing. It is the first PAIS solution to jointly guarantee verifiable transparency and strong confidentiality, overcoming inherent limitations of private blockchains and data obfuscation approaches in auditability, verifiability, and privacy protection. Through formal threat modeling, systematic security analysis, and prototype evaluation across multiple realistic scenarios, CONFETTY demonstrates robustness, low runtime overhead, and high practical feasibility—effectively satisfying dual regulatory compliance and privacy-preserving requirements.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web
• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

Abstract

Blockchain enables novel, trustworthy Process-Aware Information Systems (PAISs) by enforcing the security, robustness, and traceability of operations. In particular, transparency ensures that all information exchanges are openly accessible, fostering trust within the system. Although this is a desirable property to enable notarization and auditing activities, it also represents a limitation for such cases where confidentiality is a requirement since interactions involve sensible data. Current solutions rely on obfuscation techniques or private infrastructures, hindering the enforcing capabilities of smart contracts and the public verifiability of transactions. Against this background, we propose CONFETTY, an architecture for blockchain-based PAISs aimed at preserving both confidentiality and transparency. Smart contracts enact, enforce and store public interactions, while attribute-based encryption techniques are adopted to specify access grants to confidential information. We assess the security of our solution through a systematic threat model analysis and assess its practical feasibility by gauging the performance of our implemented prototype in different scenarios from the literature.

Problem

• Balancing confidentiality and transparency in blockchain-based PAISs
• Addressing limitations of current obfuscation and private infrastructure solutions
• Ensuring secure access to sensitive data while maintaining public verifiability

Innovation

• Blockchain-based PAIS with CONFETTY architecture
• Smart contracts manage public interactions
• Attribute-based encryption for confidential access