Privacy-Preserving Alpha Algorithm for Software Analysis

Validation in a big software system can be managed by analysis of its behaviour through occasionally collected event logs. Process mining is a technique to perform software validation by discovering process models from event logs or by checking the conformance of the logs to a process model. A well-known algorithm in process mining to discover process models is alpha algorithm. However, while utilising alpha algorithm is useful for software validation, the existence of some sensitive information in the log files may become a threat for the privacy of users. In this work, we propose a protocol for privacy-preserving alpha algorithm on encrypted data. Our protocol aims to generate process models for a software without leaking any information about its users. It achieves same computational complexity with the original algorithm despite the additional computation overhead.