Process Mining in Trusted Execution Environments: Towards Hardware Guarantees for Trust-Aware Inter-organizational Process Analysis

Abstract

Process mining techniques enable business process analysis on event logs extracted from information systems. Currently, industry applications and research in process mining predominantly analyze intra-organizational processes. Intra-organizational processes deal with the workflows within a single organization. However, analyzing inter-organizational processes across separate companies has the potential to generate further insights. Process analysts can use these insights for optimizations such as workflow improvements and process cost reductions. It is characteristic for inter-organization process analysis that it is not possible to uncover the insights by analyzing the event logs of a single organization in isolation. On the other hand, privacy and trust issues are a considerable obstacle to adopting inter-organizational process mining applications. The independent companies fear competitive disadvantages by letting third parties access their valuable process logs. This paper proposes a concept for inter-organizational process mining using trusted execution environments in a decentralized cloud. The hardware-based approach aims to technically prevent data leakage to unauthorized parties without the need for a trusted intermediary. The contributions of this paper are theoretical and identify future research challenges for implementing the concept.

Laying the ground for future cross-organizational process mining research and application: a literature review

“…Müller et al. (2022) use trusted execution environments and blockchains to enable privacy-aware coPM.…”

Towards the process mining applicability in the ChickenHunt blockchain game

“…On the other hand, researchers developed strategies for the difficult task of collecting reliable information from blockchains in order to improve the examination of blockchain applications employing process mining. In this sense, Concepts for using extracted blockchain data were introduced, such as controlling business processes on a blockchain [2], verifying consensus protocols on Hyperledger Fabric [15], controlling blockchain apps on Ethereum [16], reviewing data recorded on the Ethereum network without targeting particular blockchain technologies of Decentralised Applications (DApps) [17], and employing process mining on a blockchain environment [18].…”