Introducing Trust in Service-oriented Distributed Systems through Blockchain

Business process management is concerned with the design execution, improvement, and monitoring of business processes. Systems that support the enactment and execution of processes have extensively been used by companies to streamline and automate intra-organizational processes. However, today's business enterprises must deal with global competition, heterogeneity, and rapidly develop new services and products. To address these requirements, the services reuse-based approach allowed enterprises to reconsider and optimize the way they do business, and change their information systems and applications to support collaborative business processes. Service choreographies support the reuse-based service-oriented philosophy in that they represent a powerful and flexible approach to realize systems by (possibly) reusing services and composing them in a fully distributed way. Nevertheless, for inter-organizational processes, challenges of collaborative design and lack of mutual trust have hampered a broader uptake. In this paper, we show an early stage approach to address the problem of trust in services choreography by using Blockchain technologies, in order to support the decentralized and peer-to-peer collaboration in a trustworthy manner, even in a network without any mutual trust between nodes.