Abstract
For the enactment of inter-organizational processes, blockchain can guarantee the enforcement of process models and the integrity of execution traces. However, existing solutions come with downsides regarding throughput scalability, latency, and suboptimal tradeoffs between confidentiality and transparency. To address these issues, we propose to change the foundation of blockchain-based process enactment: from on-chain smart contracts to state channels, an overlay network on top of a blockchain. State channels allow conducting most transactions off-chain while mostly retaining the core security properties offered by blockchain. Our proposal, process channels, is a model-driven approach to enacting processes on state channels, with the aim to retain the desired blockchain properties while reducing the on-chain footprint as much as possible. We here focus on the principled approach of state channels as a platform, to enable manifold future optimizations in various directions, like latency and confidentiality. We implement our approach prototypical and evaluate it both qualitatively (w.r.t. assumptions and guarantees) and quantitatively (w.r.t. correctness and gas cost). In short, while the initial deployment effort is higher with state channels, it typically pays off after a few process instances—considerably reducing cost. And as long as the new assumptions hold, so do the guarantees.
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Notes
- 1.
We generally assume a party “looks after themselves”, and follows a strategy with the highest payoff.
- 2.
Hyperledger Fabric uses the terminology of channels for their subnet functionality [11]. The similarity to state channels is weak; like subnets, fabric channels partition the on-chain ledger. State channels construct off-chain channels and use the security guarantees of the on-chain ledger as settlement and dispute resolution layer.
- 3.
A choreography task can be one-way or two-way: i.e., it optionally includes a response. We assume that a choreography task is one-way; two-way tasks can be regarded as syntactic sugar and adding support for those is no conceptual challenge.
- 4.
This procedure can be made easier by forcing deployment from an agreed upon channel factory contract [2, Chapter 7.4.4].
- 5.
To prevent the replay of transitions across cases, instances, or blockchains, unique identifiers must also be included, e.g., case ID, instance ID, and chain ID.
- 6.
To reduce the amount of messages, confirmations can be prepended to a transition proposal. That is, once an initiator has collected all signatures for \(step_{i}\)., it only sends the confirmation to the next initiator. The next initiator prepends the confirmations to the next transition proposal \(step_{i+1}\).
- 7.
See Node.js, https://nodejs.org/en, accessed 2023-03-17.
- 8.
See Docker Compose, https://docs.docker.com/compose, accessed 2023-03-17.
- 9.
See Ganache, https://trufflesuite.com/ganache, accessed 2023-03-17.
- 10.
Leafhopper is available at https://github.com/fstiehle/leafhopper. The repository includes instructions and scripts to automate the replication of our evaluation. Chorpiler is available at https://github.com/fstiehle/chorpiler.
- 11.
We removed any coincidentally created conforming traces. In total we replayed 1812 non-conforming traces to the incident mgmt. and 1933 to the supply chain case.
- 12.
Normally, the local trigger would also verify the request and only forward valid requests. We disabled this functionality to allow us to simulate a faulty component.
- 13.
- 14.
IACCM: Are you in an adversarial industry? Insights for contract negotiators and managers. 2014. https://wp.me/pa5oX-RH, accessed 2023-03-28.
- 15.
Due to the different feature sets being supported, these approaches incur different gas costs; cost should not be understood as the only yardstick to compare approaches by. Since our approach in this paper is quite different from full on-chain approaches, we find this comparison worthwhile reporting.
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Stiehle, F., Weber, I. (2023). Process Channels: A New Layer for Process Enactment Based on Blockchain State Channels. In: Di Francescomarino, C., Burattin, A., Janiesch, C., Sadiq, S. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14159. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41620-0_12
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