41,076 research outputs found
On Secure Workflow Decentralisation on the Internet
Decentralised workflow management systems are a new research area, where most
work to-date has focused on the system's overall architecture. As little
attention has been given to the security aspects in such systems, we follow a
security driven approach, and consider, from the perspective of available
security building blocks, how security can be implemented and what new
opportunities are presented when empowering the decentralised environment with
modern distributed security protocols. Our research is motivated by a more
general question of how to combine the positive enablers that email exchange
enjoys, with the general benefits of workflow systems, and more specifically
with the benefits that can be introduced in a decentralised environment. This
aims to equip email users with a set of tools to manage the semantics of a
message exchange, contents, participants and their roles in the exchange in an
environment that provides inherent assurances of security and privacy. This
work is based on a survey of contemporary distributed security protocols, and
considers how these protocols could be used in implementing a distributed
workflow management system with decentralised control . We review a set of
these protocols, focusing on the required message sequences in reviewing the
protocols, and discuss how these security protocols provide the foundations for
implementing core control-flow, data, and resource patterns in a distributed
workflow environment
Authorization and access control of application data in Workflow systems
Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) are used to support the modeling and coordinated execution of business processes within an organization or across organizational boundaries. Although some research efforts have addressed requirements for authorization and access control for workflow systems, little attention has been paid to the requirements as they apply to application data accessed or managed by WfMSs. In this paper, we discuss key access control requirements for application data in workflow applications using examples from the healthcare domain, introduce a classification of application data used in workflow systems by analyzing their sources, and then propose a comprehensive data authorization and access control mechanism for WfMSs. This involves four aspects: role, task, process instance-based user group, and data content. For implementation, a predicate-based access control method is used. We believe that the proposed model is applicable to workflow applications and WfMSs with diverse access control requirements
Possibilistic Information Flow Control for Workflow Management Systems
In workflows and business processes, there are often security requirements on
both the data, i.e. confidentiality and integrity, and the process, e.g.
separation of duty. Graphical notations exist for specifying both workflows and
associated security requirements. We present an approach for formally verifying
that a workflow satisfies such security requirements. For this purpose, we
define the semantics of a workflow as a state-event system and formalise
security properties in a trace-based way, i.e. on an abstract level without
depending on details of enforcement mechanisms such as Role-Based Access
Control (RBAC). This formal model then allows us to build upon well-known
verification techniques for information flow control. We describe how a
compositional verification methodology for possibilistic information flow can
be adapted to verify that a specification of a distributed workflow management
system satisfies security requirements on both data and processes.Comment: In Proceedings GraMSec 2014, arXiv:1404.163
Authorised Translations of Electronic Documents
A concept is proposed to extend authorised translations of documents to
electronically signed, digital documents. Central element of the solution is an
electronic seal, embodied as an XML data structure, which attests to the
correctness of the translation and the authorisation of the translator. The
seal contains a digital signature binding together original and translated
document, thus enabling forensic inspection and therefore legal security in the
appropriation of the translation. Organisational aspects of possible
implementation variants of electronic authorised translations are discussed and
a realisation as a stand-alone web-service is presented.Comment: In: Peer-reviewed Proceedings of the Information Security South
Africa (ISSA) 2006 From Insight to Foresight Conference, 5 to 7 July 2006,
Sandton, South Afric
Distributed Access Control for Web and Business Processes
Middleware influenced the research community in developing a number of systems for controlling access to distributed resources. Nowadays a new paradigm for the lightweight integration of business resources from different partners is starting to take hold – Web Services and Business Processes for Web Services. Security and access control policies for Web Services protocols and distributed systems are well studied and almost standardized, but there is not yet a comprehensive proposal for an access control architecture for business processes. So, it is worth looking at the available approaches to distributed authorization as a starting point for a better understanding of what they already have and what they still need to address the security challenges for business processes
Provenance Views for Module Privacy
Scientific workflow systems increasingly store provenance information about
the module executions used to produce a data item, as well as the parameter
settings and intermediate data items passed between module executions. However,
authors/owners of workflows may wish to keep some of this information
confidential. In particular, a module may be proprietary, and users should not
be able to infer its behavior by seeing mappings between all data inputs and
outputs. The problem we address in this paper is the following: Given a
workflow, abstractly modeled by a relation R, a privacy requirement \Gamma and
costs associated with data. The owner of the workflow decides which data
(attributes) to hide, and provides the user with a view R' which is the
projection of R over attributes which have not been hidden. The goal is to
minimize the cost of hidden data while guaranteeing that individual modules are
\Gamma -private. We call this the "secureview" problem. We formally define the
problem, study its complexity, and offer algorithmic solutions
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