Designing secure service workflows in BPEL

Abstract

This paper presents an approach that we have developed to support the design of secure service based applications in BPEL. The approach is based on the use of secure service composition patterns, which are proven to preserve composition level security properties if the services that are composed according to the pattern satisfy other properties individually. The secure service composition patterns are used for two purposes: (a) to analyse whether a given workflow fragment satisfies a given security property, and (b) to generate compositions of services that could substitute for individual services within the workflow that cause the violation of the security properties. Our approach has been implemented in a tool that is based on Eclipse BPEL Designer.