Verifying BPEL workflows under authorisation constraints

Abstract

Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), or Web Services BPEL (WS-BPEL), is the standard for specifying workflow process definition using web services. Research on formal modelling and verification of BPEL has largely concentrated on control flow and data flow, while security related properties have received little attention. In this work, we present a formal framework that integrates Role Based Access Control (RBAC) into BPEL and allows us to express authorisation constraints using temporal logic. Using this framework, we show how model-checking can be applied to verify that a given BPEL process satisfies the security constraints. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.