Attribute-Based Security Verification of Business Process Models

Business processes, as the instruments used by organisations to produce value, need to comply with a number of internally and externally imposed standards and restrictions. Since the majority of such processes involve the exchange of sensitive third party information, their compliance to security constraints needs to be verified before they can be implemented. Current attempts for the verification of security compliance of design-time business process models involve the transformation of both the model and the desired security properties into formal specifications, which can be then used as input for automated model checkers. Such an approach is usually costly both in terms of time and specialised knowledge, while also its coverage can be limited to specific types of security requirements. In this work we introduce an approach for the verification of security in business process models based on structural properties of the workflow of the process. To that end, we introduce a series of attributes to existing BPMN 2.0 concepts and algorithms for checking the compliance of a process model against the most common security requirements. Finally, a real-world business process is used to demonstrate and evaluate the applicability of our proposal.