Information flow control for workflow management systems

Abstract

Workflow management plays an important role in analyzing and automating business processes. Security requirements in workflow management systems are typically mapped to (role-based) access control configurations. This paper focuses on information flow control, taking into account implicit information leaks. The presented approach operates on a specification level in which no executable program is available yet. We illustrate the modeling of a workflow management system as a composition of state-event systems, each representing one of the activities of the workflow. This facilitates distributed deployment and eases verification by splitting up the verification of the overall system into verification of the individual components. Confidentiality requirements are modeled in terms of information flow predicates using the MAKS framework and verified following existing decomposition methodologies, which are adapted for open systems with ongoing user interaction. We discuss the interaction with other security requirements, notably separation of duty.

Information Channels Effectiveness Assessment on the Basis of Data from Statistical Survey

“…The paper Xiaohui Liu and Youwang Sun, 2011 analyzes information flow management of information system in automobile parts inbound logistics based on the environment of internet of things. Bauereiß and Hutter, 2014 in their paper focuses on information flow control, taking into account implicit information leaks. The presented approach operates on a specification level in which no executable program is available yet.…”

Verifying Security Policies in Multi-agent Workflows with Loops

“…is is contrast to our formalism, where workflow steps are executed synchronously by a set of agents. Information flow in business processes has been considered, e.g., in [4]. ere the MASK framework for possibilistic information flow security [26], and in particular a variant of the unwinding technique from [17], is used to prove that specifications satisfying particular constraints are safe.…”

“…We have implemented our approach into the tool NIWO. 4 Our tool takes as input the specification of a workflow together with declassification conditions and the number of causal agents. From that, it generates a sorted FOLTL formula whose satisfiability is equivalent to the existence of a violation of the non-interference property.…”

“…Verification techniques for workflows (cf. [4,16,21]) typically build on classic notions of secrecy such as non-interference [17]. e particular challenge with verifying web-based workflow systems is that here is no fixed set of agents participating in the workflow.…”

“…Verification techniques for workflows (cf. [4,16,21]) typically build on classic notions of secrecy such as non-interference [17].…”