On the modeling and verification of security-aware and process-aware information systems

Abstract

Many business processes are modeled as workflows, which often need to comply with business rules, legal requirements, and authorization policies. Workflow satisfiability is the problem of determining whether there exists a workflow instance that realizes the workflow specification while simultaneously complying with such constraints. Although this problem has been studied by the computer security community in the past, existing solutions are tailored for particular workflow models, so their applicability to other models or richer forms of analysis is questionable. We here investigate whether the satisfiability of formulas in an NP-complete fragment of linear-time temporal logic can serve as a more expressive and versatile tool for deciding the satisfiability of workflows. We also show that this fragment can solve this problem for a standard model from the literature. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.