A Design-Time Semi-Automatic Approach for Obfuscating a Business Process Model in a Trusted Multi-Cloud Deployment

Abstract

To enjoy the benefits of cloud computing, organizations managing complex business processes want to outsource their processes. However, as such processes express their know-how and because of the nature of the cloud, they are still reluctant to do so. To prevent such a know-how exposure, this article proposes a design-time approach for obfuscating a BP model by splitting its model into a collaboration of BP fragments semantically equivalent to the initial BP. This breaking down renders the discovery by cloud providers of-the-deep content of a critical fragment, and more of the whole process, much harder when these fragments are deployed in a multi-cloud context. While existing contributions on the topic of BP obfuscation remain at the level of principles, the authors propose an algorithm supporting automatically such a BP model transformation. The approach is validated against an obfuscation metric introduced in the article. The obtained results show that the authors' algorithm generates BP fragment with a high obfuscation level, contributing to protect BP know-how when deployed in a multi-cloud context.