Trusted Compliance Checking on Blockchain with Commitments: A Model-Driven Approach

Blockchain and smart contracts are promising technologies to perform trusted compliance checking. By formalizing compliance rules with smart contract code and collecting information required to assess them on-chain, anyone can verify if a compliance violation occurred. To this aim, tools and techniques to execute business processes on-chain have been proposed. However, such techniques require the activities and the process data internal to an organization to be fully disclosed with all the participants. This may not be desirable for confidentiality reasons, and may also lead to high operational costs. This paper proposes a model-driven approach that uses a choreography diagram annotated with commitments to model compliance rules and to identify the message exchanges that are relevant for enforcing business agreements. The resulting diagram is used to generate the smart contract code required to perform compliance checking, limiting the information stored in the blockchain to the one strictly needed to evaluate the compliance rules.