Modeling and verifying security policies in business processes

Modern information systems are large-sized and comprise multiple heterogeneous and autonomous components. Autonomy enables decentralization, but it also implies that components providers are free to change, retire, or introduce new components. This is a threat to security, and calls for a continuous verification process to ensure compliance with security policies. Existing verification frameworks either have limited expressiveness-thereby inhibiting the specification of real-world requirements-, or rely on formal languages that are hardly employable for modeling and verifying large systems. In this paper, we overcome the limitations of existing approaches by proposing a framework that enables: (1) specifying information systems in SecBPMN, a security-oriented extension of BPMN; (2) expressing security policies through SecBPMN-Q, a query language for representing security policies; and (3) verifying SecBPMN-Q against SecBPMN specifications via an implemented query engine. We report on the applicability of our approach via a case study about air traffic management. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.