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.