Behavioral Attestation for Business Processes

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural paradigm that enables dynamic composition of heterogeneous, independent, multi-vendor business services. A prerequisite for such inter-organizational workflows is the establishment of trustworthiness, which is mostly achieved through non-technical measures such as legislation, and/or social consent that businesses, or organizations simply pledge themselves to adhere. In our viewpoint, a business process can only be trustworthy if the behavior of all services in it is trustworthy. Trusted Computing Group (TCG) has defined an open set of specifications for the establishment of trustworthiness through a hardware root-of-trust. This paper has three objectives: firstly, the behavior of individual services in a business process is formally specified. Secondly, in order to overcome the inherent weaknesses of trust management through software alone, a hardware root of-trust devised by the TCG, is used for the measurement of the behavior of individual services in a business process. Finally, a verification mechanism is detailed through which the trustworthiness of a business process can be verified.