Method to automate electronic signature assignment to documents in a BPEL business process (20-Jan-2010)

Method to automate electronic signature assignment to documents in a BPEL business process

It is proposed to do a tight integration between business process management and digital signature management. Automated digital signing of documents may be performed as part of a business process, including the transactional support of business process management. For this, a new task type is introduced, named a "human signing task" and an automated step, named "signature verification". Fig. 1 shows a business process [1.1] with a start step [1.3], a decision step [1.4], a human signing task [1.5] and another step [1.6]. Documents [1.2] are typically stored in content repositories -- when being used in the context of a business process, it is common to work with links to a content repository. These links are then stored along with an instance of a business process. When a human task in the business process has to present documents or parts of documents, the associated links are resolved and the content repository is accessed.

Digital documents are commonly signed as follows (see, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital

_signature):

Each user gets individual private and a public keys as well as a certificate
A signing algorithm takes the document and a private key for a certain users and produces a signature
The signature and the certificate are then used to sign the document

For the automated digital document signing in the context of a business process, a certificate repository [1.8], storing one or many certificates [1.9] are defined for a certain business process or business process management system.

During a signing task [1.5], the associated document [1.7] is signed using the corresponding certificate and signature [1.10].

1

Fig 1. A business process with a human signing task

Fig. 2 shows details of the human signing task [2.1]. During business process execution, users are presented with information about the task and document [2.2] as well as with an input field [2.3] to provide their private key for document signing. The human signing task is also linked to the certificate repository [2.4], containing one or more certificates [2.5]. After submitting the input window [2.2] with the private key [2.3], the business process management system automatically performs the signature steps as described above. The associated document is automatically checked out from the content repository, digitally signed and then checked in again. This operation may participate in an overall business transaction and therefore is subject to be r...