A Collaborative and Decentralised Approach for Auditing of Distributed Workflows

Nehme, Antonio (2020) A Collaborative and Decentralised Approach for Auditing of Distributed Workflows. Doctoral thesis, Birmingham City University.

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Text Antonio Nehme PhD Thesis published_Final Version_Submitted Jan 2020_Final Award Jul 2020.pdf - Accepted Version Download (17MB)

Abstract

The world is on a continuous move towards collaborations between organisations. This practice is common in many domains including government, health, supply chain and engineering. Collaborations are enabled by inter-operable applications through which each organisation makes a contribution in a workflow. Depending on the application domain, a number of assurances are needed for the security and robustness of the workflow while non-repudiation is a common requirement. The contribution of this work revolves around assuring non-repudiation in distributed collaborations without relying on a single point of trust. In comparison with common practices, this thesis proposes an approach for auditing that does not trust a single entity to protect the integrity or availability of audit trails, or to generate or verify the correctness of audit records. To achieve this aim, security of applications within each organisation including their resilience and defence against intrusion needs to be covered as a pre-requisite of the security of the collaboration; availability and scalability of each application are also essential to fulfil a collaboration. Microservices architectural paradigm enables building scalable and maintainable applications and it is expected to become the default paradigm in the next five years. Microservices applications, however, are challenging to secure and the literature lacks a comprehensive reference that covers the specifications of this paradigm.

This research starts by targeting security of microservices-based applications and carries on to cover non-repudiation in distributed workflow collaborations. For the first part, a security reference architecture covering microservices specifications throughout the application development life cycle is presented, as well as an access control framework to limit vulnerabilities caused by following common old practices. As for the second part, a robust, confidentiality friendly and application-agnostic approach is offered to create verifiable audit trails that cover any degree of details in workflow collaborations and give auditing capabilities to any threshold of participants. This thesis presents an implementation of the proposed approach for auditing using an untrusted centralised server, and another using blockchain.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Dates:	Date Event 14 July 2020 Accepted
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Microservices, Auditing, Workflows, Confidentiality, Integrity, Trust, Blockchain.
Subjects:	CAH11 - computing > CAH11-01 - computing > CAH11-01-01 - computer science
Divisions:	Doctoral Research College > Doctoral Theses Collection Faculty of Computing, Engineering and the Built Environment > College of Computing
Depositing User:	Louise Muldowney
Date Deposited:	21 Mar 2025 10:25
Last Modified:	21 Mar 2025 10:25
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/16243

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