Expanding the Horizon of Provenance Domains for Smart Contract-Based Workflows

Abstract

Decentralized workflows supported by provenance data aim to combine into a platform with high trustworthiness, transparency, and accountability. Despite the huge potential of the approach, one limitation of the system architecture is that it lacks access to external data, limiting the functionality and potential use cases of the workflow. To address this limitation, we extend an existing decentralized workflow with a provenance bridge, enabling the workflow to access external provenance-supported data without damaging the trustworthiness of the system. The introduction of this bridge effectively broadens the range of use cases for the decentralized workflow by opening it to various external provenance-supported data sources. This article presents the architectural design of the provenance bridge-enabled workflow system, and discusses our prototype implementation effort along with evaluation results. Specifically, we have designed and implemented the architectural framework of the provenance bridge that expands the provenance domain boundary by incorporating support for provenance model translation and oracle-based external data access. The proposed approach lays a solid foundation for a wider adoption of smart contract-based workflow systems by effectively bridging the gap between different provenance domains.