6 research outputs found
Introducing Security Access Control Policies into Legacy Business Processes
International audienceApplying separation of concerns approaches into business process context generally results in several initiatives oriented to automatic generation of aspect code, generation of specific code according to the kind of concern (code for mapping roles and permissions derived from RBAC model for example), or proposition of new mechanisms as dedicated aspectual languages. Most of these initiatives only consider functional behaviours of business process, omitting special behaviours derived from quality attributes such as security, which can be modelled as concerns that must be supported in the business process. In this paper we propose the integration of cross-cuttings standardized control access policies (based on RBAC model and Oasis XACML) into legacy business processes, using a separation of concerns approach
Research Article Novel Security Conscious Evaluation Criteria for Web Service Composition
Abstract: This study aims to present a new mathematical based evaluation method for service composition with respects to security aspects. Web service composition as complex problem solver in service computing has become one of the recent challenging issues in today's web environment. It makes a new added value service through combination of available basic services to address the problem requirements. Despite the importance of service composition in service computing, security issues have not been addressed in this area. Considering the dazzling growth of number of service based transactions, making a secure composite service from candidate services with different security concerns is a demanding task. To deal with this challenge, different techniques have been employed which have direct impacts on secure service composition efficiency. Nonetheless, little work has been dedicated to deeply investigate those impacts on service composition outperformance. Therefore, the focus of this study is to evaluate the existing approaches based on their applied techniques and QoS aspects. A mathematicalbased security-aware evaluation framework is proposed wherein Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a multiple criteria decision making technique, is adopted. The proposed framework is tested on state-of-the-art approaches and the statistical analysis of the results presents the efficiency and correctness of the proposed work
Authorization and User Failure Resiliency for WS-BPEL Business Processes
We investigate the problem of WS-BPEL processes resiliency in RBAC-WS-BPEL, an authorization model for WS-BPEL that supports the specification of authorizations for the execution of WS-BPEL process activities by roles and users and authorization constraints, such as separation and binding of duty. The goal of resiliency is to guarantee that even if some users becomes unavailable during the execution of a WS-BPEL process, the remaining users can still complete the execution of the process. We extend RBAC-WS-BPEL with a new type of constraints called resiliency constraints and the notion of user failure resiliency for WS-BPEL processes and propose an algorithm to determine if a WS-BPEL process is user failure resilient
Tools and techniques for analysing the impact of information security
PhD ThesisThe discipline of information security is employed by organisations to protect the confidentiality,
integrity and availability of information, often communicated in the form of
information security policies. A policy expresses rules, constraints and procedures to guard
against adversarial threats and reduce risk by instigating desired and secure behaviour of
those people interacting with information legitimately. To keep aligned with a dynamic threat
landscape, evolving business requirements, regulation updates, and new technologies a policy
must undergo periodic review and change. Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are
the main decision makers on information security policies within an organisation. Making
informed policy modifications involves analysing and therefore predicting the impact of those
changes on the success rate of business processes often expressed as workflows. Security
brings an added burden to completing a workflow. Adding a new security constraint may
reduce success rate or even eliminate it if a workflow is always forced to terminate early. This
can increase the chances of employees bypassing or violating a security policy. Removing an
existing security constraint may increase success rate but may may also increase the risk to
security. A lack of suitably aimed impact analysis tools and methodologies for CISOs means
impact analysis is currently a somewhat manual and ambiguous procedure. Analysis can
be overwhelming, time consuming, error prone, and yield unclear results, especially when
workflows are complex, have a large workforce, and diverse security requirements. This
thesis considers the provision of tools and more formal techniques specific to CISOs to help
them analyse the impact modifying a security policy has on the success rate of a workflow.
More precisely, these tools and techniques have been designed to efficiently compare the
impact between two versions of a security policy applied to the same workflow, one before,
the other after a policy modification.
This work focuses on two specific types of security impact analysis. The first is quantitative
in nature, providing a measure of success rate for a security constrained workflow
which must be executed by employees who may be absent at runtime. This work considers
quantifying workflow resiliency which indicates a workflow’s expected success rate assuming
the availability of employees to be probabilistic. New aspects of quantitative resiliency are introduced in the form of workflow metrics, and risk management techniques to manage
workflows that must work with a resiliency below acceptable levels. Defining these risk
management techniques has led to exploring the reduction of resiliency computation time and
analysing resiliency in workflows with choice. The second area of focus is more qualitative,
in terms of facilitating analysis of how people are likely to behave in response to security
and how that behaviour can impact the success rate of a workflow at a task level. Large
amounts of information from disparate sources exists on human behavioural factors in a
security setting which can be aligned with security standards and structured within a single
ontology to form a knowledge base. Consultations with two CISOs have been conducted,
whose responses have driven the implementation of two new tools, one graphical, the other
Web-oriented allowing CISOs and human factors experts to record and incorporate their
knowledge directly within an ontology. The ontology can be used by CISOs to assess the
potential impact of changes made to a security policy and help devise behavioural controls
to manage that impact. The two consulted CISOs have also carried out an evaluation of the
Web-oriented tool.
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Temporal and Resource Controllability of Workflows Under Uncertainty
Workflow technology has long been employed for the modeling, validation and execution of business processes. A workflow is a formal description of a business process in which single atomic work units (tasks), organized in a partial order, are assigned to processing entities (agents) in order to achieve some business goal(s). Workflows can also employ workflow paths (projections with respect to a total truth value assignment to the Boolean variables associated to the conditional split connectors) in order (not) to execute a subset of tasks. A workflow management system coordinates the execution of tasks that are part of workflow instances such that all relevant constraints are eventually satisfied. Temporal workflows specify business processes subject to temporal constraints such as controllable or uncontrollable durations, delays and deadlines. The choice of a workflow path may be controllable or not, considered either in isolation or in combination with uncontrollable durations. Access controlled workflows specify workflows in which users are authorized for task executions and authorization constraints say which users remain authorized to execute which tasks depending on who did what. Access controlled workflows may consider workflow paths too other than the uncertain availability of resources (users, throughout this thesis). When either a task duration or the choice of the workflow path to take or the availability of a user is out of control, we need to verify that the workflow can be executed by verifying all constraints for any possible combination of behaviors arising from the uncontrollable parts. Indeed, users might be absent before starting the execution (static resiliency), they can also become so during execution (decremental resiliency) or they can come and go throughout the execution (dynamic resiliency). Temporal access controlled workflows merge the two previous formalisms by considering several kinds of uncontrollable parts simultaneously. Authorization constraints may be extended to support conditional and temporal features. A few years ago some proposals addressed the temporal controllability of workflows by encoding them into temporal networks to exploit "off-the-shelf" controllability checking algorithms available for them. However, those proposals fail to address temporal controllability where the controllable and uncontrollable choices of workflow paths may mutually influence one another. Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge, controllability of access controlled workflows subject to uncontrollable workflow paths and algorithms to validate and execute dynamically resilient workflows remain unexplored. To overcome these limitations, this thesis goes for exact algorithms by addressing temporal and resource controllability of workflows under uncertainty. I provide several new classes of (temporal) constraint networks and corresponding algorithms to check their controllability. After that, I encode workflows into these new formalisms. I also provide an encoding into instantaneous timed games to model static, decremental and dynamic resiliency and synthesize memoryless execution strategies. I developed a few tools with which I carried out some initial experimental evaluations