Workflow Signature for Business Process Compliance: A Survey

Inter organizational workflow management systems play a very important role in executing business processes among business partners in a dynamic and timely manner. An inter organizational workflow management engine is used to model and control the execution of business processes involving a combination of manual an automated activities between organizations. Before delivering their product and services to their customers each of them have to authenticate using workflow signature scheme. A workflow consists of number of tasks in the organizations. For providing more security, signing keys can be used to grant permission to perform the task and these keys are issued on the fly. Cryptographically secure scheme is not suitable because the workflow graph is arbitrary. Cryptographic scheme such as RSA provide only data authenticity and integrity. In addition to authenticity and integrity, workflow signature provides the logical relationships such as AND-join and AND-split of a workflow. In workflow signature scheme multi key hierarchical encryption scheme is used. This survey paper mainly examines the workflows and various encryption techniques are explained along the way of discussion. Keywords-Workflows, Inter organization, Multikey hierarchy