A Blockchain-Based Self-Sovereign Identity Approach for Inter-Organizational Business Processes

Blockchain presents a promising and revolutionary technology for organizations’ collaboration, particularly for Inter-Organizational Business Processes (IOBP). It addresses the lack-of-trust problem thanks to its transparency and decentralized features. However, while the adoption of Blockchain technology can alleviate some of IOBP’s challenges, it does so at the expense of significant privacy issues. In fact, some process execution data, such as customers’ data or business secrets, cannot be shared across the collaborating organizations owing to regulatory restrictions such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). To address trust and privacy issues in IOBP, this paper presents a Blockchain-based Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) approach. The SSI concept is combined with a registry proof smart contract to provide an efficient privacy-preserving solution. The proposed approach is applied to the pharmaceutical supply chain case study and implemented on the Ethereum Blockchain.

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