Distributed business process execution under partial trust

The DISTRUST project will provide a scalable prototype implementation of distributed business process execution under partial trust, that is, under precise assumptions about how much parties to the process trust each other. Existing work on distributed business process execution generally ignores the question of trust; existing work on distributed consensus, including blockchain technology, generally has been unsuccessful in achieving scalability.

The DISTRUST project will achieve scalability in a setting of more refined trust assumptions by (a) exploiting advances in hardware-based trusted execution environments and (b) adopting and exploiting a more nuanced approach to trust than simply trusting or distrusting completely. Within the Business Process Management research community, this represents a paradigm shift, where in addition to formalising process rules, we must also formalise assumptions about how much we trust collaborators to follow those rules.