Preserving business process privacy using masking

This paper discusses masking as a technique for preserving the privacy of business processes. Being sensitive by nature, business processes capture an organization’s know how with regard to who does what, when, where, and why. From a modeling perspective, a business process encompasses either activities or data artifacts where the latter are this paper’s focus. Due to the loosely coupled nature of data artifacts, applying masking to some critical data artifacts could impact the continuity of their business processes calling for a close coordination between what is referred to as a data artifact’s life cycle and transactional cycle. Both cycles encompass states that track the completion progress of a data artifact at run time. For coordination purposes during masking, exchanges of messages between life and transactional cycles take place. Experiments demonstrating the synergy between these cycles and hence, exchanges of messages in real-time are also presented in the paper.