Trustful ad hoc cross‐organizational data exchanges based on the Hyperledger Fabric framework

Abstract

Organizations share data in a cross-organizational context when they have the goal to derive additional knowledge by aggregating different data sources. The collaborations considered in this article are short-lived and ad hoc, that is, they should be set up in a few minutes at most (e.g., in emergency scenarios). The data sources are located in different domains and are not publicly accessible. When a collaboration is finished, it is however unclear which exchanges happened. This could lead to possible disputes when dishonest organizations are present. The receipt of requests/responses could be falsely denied or their content could be point of discussion. In order to prevent such disputes afterwards, a logging mechanism is needed which generates a replicated irrefutable proof of which exchanges have happened during a single collaboration. Distributed database solutions can be taken from third parties to store the generated logs, but it can be difficult to find a party which is trusted by all participating organizations. Permissioned blockchains provide a solution for this as each organization can act as a consensus participant. Although the consensus mechanism

Enabling the Rescheduling of Containerized Workloads in an Ad Hoc Cross-Organizational Collaboration

“…Both consider trust issues that arise when different organizations need to collaborate and thus share data. First, a logging mechanism is needed to allow an honest organization to protect itself against potentially malicious partners and to gain trust in the collaboration at hand [5]. Second, it should be possible for an organization to perform checks and balances with respect to container deployments that are suggested for its domain by a potentially malicious external operator [6].…”

“…This boils down to an overview of all nodes and deployed pods, corresponding resource consumption metrics, data flows between the individual organizations based on a logging solution (e.g. like the one proposed by the authors [5]), and alerts by an alerting system. When an application needed for the cross-organizational collaboration shows issues related to quality of service, an operator may decide to reschedule the corresponding pod.…”

A secure cross‐organizational container deployment approach to enable ad hoc collaborations

“…Using this environment, it is possible for an orchestrator to deploy any kind of application in the federated cluster with only minimal installation and configuration input needed from the participating organizations. One such application is proposed in a previous article by the authors, 7 where a logging mechanism using a decentralized database setup is suggested in order to persist logs describing cross‐organizational data exchanges. This mechanism allows an honest organization to protect itself against the potentially malicious behaviour of other participating organizations.…”