Formalization of security patterns as a means to infer security controls in business processes

The growing trend towards the automation and externalization of business processes by means of Technology Infrastructure (TI), such as Business Process Management Systems, has increased the security risks in the organizations. In the majority of cases, the issue of security is overlooked by default in these systems. Therefore, the early selection and implementation of security controls that mitigate risks is a real and crucial need. Nevertheless, there exists an enormous range of IT security controls and their configuration is a human, manual, time-consuming and error-prone task. In addition, security controls are implemented out separately from the organization perspective and involve many stakeholders. This separation makes difficult to ensure the effectiveness of these controls with regard to organizational requirements. In this article, we propose a formalization of security controls based on security pattern templates and feature models. This formalization allows applying feature domain-oriented analysis and constraint programming techniques for the automatic inference, selection and generation of optimal security controls with regard to single and multiple business objectivesJunta de Andalucía P08-TIC-04095Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2009-1371

Smart Contract Languages: A Multivocal Mapping Study

Blockchain is a disruptive technology that has attracted the attention of the scientific community and compa nies, as proven by the exponential growth of publications on this topic in recent years. This growing interest is mainly due to the promise that the use of blockchain enables it to be verified, without including any trusted intermediaries, that the information received from the network is authentic and up-to-date. In this respect, blockchain is a distributed database that can be seen as a ledger that records all transactions that have ever been executed. In this context, smart contracts are pieces of software used to facilitate, verify, and enforce the negotiation of a transaction on a blockchain platform. These pieces of software are implemented by using programming languages, which are sometimes provided by the blockchain platforms themselves. This study aims to (1) identify and categorise the state-of-the-art related to smart contract languages, in terms of the existing languages and their main features, and (2) identify new research opportunities. The review has been conducted as a multivocal mapping study that followsthe guidelines proposed by Garousi et al. for conducting multivocal literature reviews, as well as the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham and Charters for conducting mapping studies. As a result of the implementation of the review protocol, 4,119 papers were gathered, and 109 of them were selected for extraction. The contributions of this article are twofold: (1) 101 different smart contract languages have been identified and classified according to a variety of criteria; (2) a discussion on the findings and their implications for future research have been outlined. As a conclusion, it could be stated that a rigorous and replicable overview of the state-of-the-art of smart contract languages has been provided that can benefit not only researchers but also practitioners in the field, thanks to its multivocal nature.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología RTI2018-094283-B-C33 (ECLIPSE)Junta de Andalucía COPERNICA (P20-01224)Junta de Andalucía METAMORFOSIS (US-1381375

OPBUS: Risk-aware framework for the conformance of security-quality requirements in business processes

Several reports indicate that one of the most important business priorities is the improvement of business and IT management. Nowadays, business processes and in general service-based ones use other external services which are not under their jurisdiction. Organizations do not usually consider their exposition to security risks when business processes cross organizational boundaries. In this paper, we propose a risk aware framework for security-quality requirements in business processes management. This framework is focused on the inclusion of security issues from design to execution. The framework provides innovative mechanisms based on model-based diagnosis and constraint programming in order to carry out the risk assessment of business processes and the automatic check of the conformance of security requirements.Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-04095Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2009-1371

AFPL2, An Abstract Language for Firewall ACLs with NAT support

The design and management of firewall ACLs is a very hard and error-prone task. Part of this complexity comes from the fact that each firewall platform has its own low-level language with a different functionality, syntax, and development environment. Although high-level languages have been proposed to model firewall ACLs, none of them has been widely adopted by the industry due to a combination of factors: high complexity, no support of important features of firewalls, etc. In this paper the most important access control policy languages are reviewed, with special focus on the development of firewall ACLs. Based on this analysis, a new domain specific language for firewall ACLs (AFPL2) is proposed, supporting more features that other languages do not cover (e.g. NAT). As the result of our design methodology, AFPL2 is very lightweight and easy to use. AFPL2 can be translated to existing low-level firewall languages, or be directly interpreted by firewall platforms, and is an extension to a previously developed language.Ministerio de Eduación y Ciencia DPI2006-15476-C02-0

Contract-based test generation for data flow of business processes using constraint programming

The verification of the properties of a business process (BP) has become a significant research topic in recent years. In the early stages of development, the BP model (e.g. BPMN, EPC), the BP contract (task contract, regulations and laws, business rules), and the test objectives (requirements) are the only elements available. In order to support the modellers, automatic tools must be provided in order to check whether their business processes are in line with the BP contract. This paper proposes a new business process called the automatic test-case generator to automate the generation of test cases and verify that a BP has the intended functionality (semantic conformance). This generator is analysed, designed and implemented by taking into account the following tasks: Annotation of the BP model with the business process contract, calculation of the various data flow paths, transformation of these data flow paths into SSA form, and a modelling of a constraint satisfaction problem (constraint programming) of the BP contract for all data flow paths. The execution of this business process generates the test cases automatically.Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-04095Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2009-1371

A Model-Driven Engineering approach with Diagnosis of Non-Conformance of Security Objectives in Business Process Models

Several reports indicate that the highest business priorities include: business improvement, security, and IT management. The importance of security and risk management is gaining that even government statements in some cases have imposed the inclusion of security and risk management within business management. Risk assessment has become an essential mechanism for business security analysts, since it allows the identification and evaluation of any threats, vulnerabilities, and risks to which organizations maybe be exposed. In this work, a framework based on the concepts of Model-Driven Development has been proposed. The framework provides different stages which range from a high abstraction level to an executable level. The main contribution lie in the presentation of an extension of a business process meta-model which includes risk information based on standard approaches. The meta-model provides necessary characteristics for the risk assessment of business process models at an abstract level of the approach. The framework has been equipped with specific stages for the automatic validation of business processes using model-based diagnosis which permits the detection of the non-conformance of security objectives specified. The validation stages ensure that business processes are correct with regard to the objectives specified by the customer before they are transformed into executable processes.Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-04095Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2009-1371

A Quadratic, Complete, and Minimal Consistency Diagnosis Process for Firewall ACLs

Developing and managing firewall Access Control Lists (ACLs) are hard, time-consuming, and error-prone tasks for a variety of reasons. Complexity of networks is constantly increasing, as it is the size of firewall ACLs. Networks have different access control requirements which must be translated by a network administrator into firewall ACLs. During this task, inconsistent rules can be introduced in the ACL. Furthermore, each time a rule is modified (e.g. updated, corrected when a fault is found, etc.) a new inconsistency with other rules can be introduced. An inconsistent firewall ACL implies, in general, a design or development fault, and indicates that the firewall is accepting traffic that should be denied or vice versa. In this paper we propose a complete and minimal consistency diagnosis process which has worst-case quadratic time complexity with the number of rules in a set of inconsistent rules. There are other proposals of consistency diagnosis algorithms. However they have different problems which can prevent their use with big, real-life, ACLs: on the one hand, the minimal ones have exponential worst-case time complexity; on the other hand, the polynomial ones are not minimal.Ministerio de Eduación y Ciencia TIN2009-1371

Business Process Configuration According to Data Dependency Specification

Configuration techniques have been used in several fields, such as the design of business process models. Sometimes these models depend on the data dependencies, being easier to describe what has to be done instead of how. Configuration models enable to use a declarative representation of business processes, deciding the most appropriate work-flow in each case. Unfortunately, data dependencies among the activities and how they can affect the correct execution of the process, has been overlooked in the declarative specifications and configurable systems found in the literature. In order to find the best process configuration for optimizing the execution time of processes according to data dependencies, we propose the use of Constraint Programming paradigm with the aim of obtaining an adaptable imperative model in function of the data dependencies of the activities described declarative.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2015-63502-C3-2-RFondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regiona

FABIOLA: Defining the Components for Constraint Optimization Problems in Big Data Environment

The optimization problems can be found in several examples within companies, such as the minimization of the production costs, the faults produced, or the maximization of customer loyalty. The resolution of them is a challenge that entails an extra effort. In addition, many of today’s enterprises are encountering the Big Data problems added to these optimization problems. Unfortunately, to tackle this challenge by medium and small companies is extremely difficult or even impossible. In this paper, we propose a framework that isolates companies from how the optimization problems are solved. More specifically, we solve optimization problems where the data is heterogeneous, distributed and of a huge volume. FABIOLA (FAst BIg cOstraint LAb) framework enables to describe the distributed and structured data used in optimization problems that can be parallelized (the variables are not shared between the various optimization problems), and obtains a solution using Constraint Programming Techniques

Efficient algorithms and abstract data types for local inconsistency isolation in firewall ACLS

Writing and managing firewall ACLs are hard, tedious, time-consuming and error-prone tasks for a wide range of reasons. During these tasks, inconsistent rules can be introduced. An inconsistent firewall ACL implies in general a design fault, and indicates that the firewall is accepting traffic that should be denied or vice versa. This can result in severe problems such as unwanted accesses to services, denial of service, overflows, etc. However, the administrator is who ultimately decides if an inconsistent rule is a fault or not. Although many algorithms to detect and manage inconsistencies in firewall ACLs have been proposed, they have different drawbacks regarding different aspects of the consistency diagnosis problem, which can prevent their use in a wide range of real-life situations. In this paper, we review these algorithms along with their drawbacks, and propose a new divide and conquer based algorithm, which uses specialized abstract data types. The proposed algorithm returns consistency results over the original ACL. Its computational complexity is better than the current best algorithm for inconsistency isolation, as experimental results will also show.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia DIP2006-15476-C02-0