Deploying Access and Flow Control in Distributed Workflows
Workflows are operational business processes. Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) tire concerned with the control and coordination of these workflows. In recent years, there has beet? a trend to integrate WFMS it? distributed inter-organizational systems. In this case malfuntioning of one WFMS can affect more than one organization, making the correct functioning of a WFMS a critical issue. Thus, an important function of WFMS is to enforce the security of these inter- organizational workflows. Several works have been done to integrate the security aspects in the workflow specification. Unfortunately, these research works generally adopt a centralized management approach and are based on static access control models. Therefore, they do not deal with flow control, a very important requirement in WFMS. In this paper, we suggest a decentralized and dynamic approach to handle a security policy in workflows taking into account access and flow control. The last part of the paper deals with the workflow satisfiability problem. It studies the complexity of the problem which asks whether a set of users can complete a constrained workflow in some system configuration.
wfms security policy orbac dte petri nets