Towards definition of secure business processes

Abstract

Business process modelling is one of the major aspects in the modern system development. Recently business process model and notation (BPMN) has become a standard technique to support this activity. Although BPMN is a good approach to understand business processes, there is a limited work to understand how it could deal with business security and security risk management. This is a problem, since both business processes and security concerns should be understood in parallel to support a development of the secure systems. In this paper we analyse BPMN with respect to the domain model of the IS security risk management (ISSRM). We apply a structured approach to understand key aspects of BPMN and how modeller could express secure assets, risks and risk treatment using BPMN. We align the main BPMN constructs with the key concepts of the ISSRM domain model. We show applicability of our approach on a running example related to the Internet store. Our proposal would allow system analysts to understand how to develop security requirements to secure important assets defined through business processes. In addition we open a possibility for the business and security model interoperability and the model transformation between several modelling approaches (if these both are aligned to the ISSRM domain model). © 2012 Springer-Verlag.