SPRINT- Responsibilities: Design and Development of Security

Policies in Process-aware Information Systems

Maria Leitner¹⁺, Juergen Mangler², and Stefanie Rinderle-Ma¹

¹University of Vienna

Faculty of Computer Science

Research Group Workflow Systems and Technology

Vienna, Austria
{maria.leitner,stefanie.rinderle-ma}@univie.ac.at

²SBA Research

Vienna, Austria
jmangler@sba-research.org

Abstract

Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS) enable the definition, execution, and management of

business processes. Typically, processes are specified by control flow, data flow, and users or services,

authorized to execute process tasks. During process execution, it is often necessary to access

sensitive data such as patient or customer information. To secure this confidential data, the use of

security policies becomes an essential factor for the application of PAIS in practice. In general, PAIS

security policies are specified based on access rules and authorization constraints. On top of these

rules, context policies referring to data, location, or time might pose restrictions. Over the years,

several approaches for modeling and enforcing security policies in PAIS have appeared. Many of

them restrict security policy specification to access rules and authorization constraints, but neglect

additional properties such as context information. As a further limitation, security policies are often

defined in a heterogeneous way: whereas access rules are mostly defined at process task level leading

to a merge of process logic and security aspects, additional policies such as authorization constraints

are defined separately from the process logic. Consequently, security policies are not stored and managed

centrally, but are rather distributed over different PAIS components, for example, the process

model repository or the organizational model manager. In this paper, we introduce the formal concepts

behind our SPRINT approach that aims at the consequent separation of security policies and

process logic. Specifically, the SPRINT security policy data model and design methodology based

on the concepts of responsibilities, permissions, and constraints will be provided. The concepts are

evaluated based on a comparison with existing PAIS and a demonstration of the SPRINT prototype.

The goal is to unify diverse security policies in different PAIS subsystems, to make security policies

independent of these subsystems in order to restrain complexity from process modeling and evolution,

and to allow for comprehensive security policy development and maintenance.

Keywords: Security policy design, workflow security, responsibilities, access control,
security constraints, process-aware information systems

+: Corresponding author: Maria Leitner

University of Vienna, Faculty of Computer Science, Workflow Systems and Technology,

Rathausstrasse 19/9, A-1010 Vienna, Austria, Tel: +431427739513, Email: maria.leitner@univie.ac.at

Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications (JoWUA),

Vol. 2, No. 4, pp. 4-26, December 2011 [pdf]