Detective Information Flow Analysis for Business Processes

Abstract: We report on ongoing work towards a posteriori detection of illegal information flows for business processes, focusing on the challenges involved in doing so. Resembling a forensic investigation, our approach aims at analyzing the audit trails resultant from the execution of the business processes, locating informations flows that violate the (non-functional) requirements stipulated by security policies. The goal is to obtain fine-grained evidence of policy compliance with respect to information flows. Information flow (IF) characterizes the transfer of information from a classified container h to a public container l during the execution of a process [Lam73]. A "container" can be a logical or physical device, such as a process instance, network socket, or variable. An IF is labeled "illegal" whenever it violates the security policies expressing the non-functional requirements put on the execution of the process, in particular the confidentiality and nonin...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: BPSC
• Authors: Rafael Accorsi, Claus Wonnemann
• Keywords: BPSC 2007, BPSC 2009, Business Processes, Information Flow, Security Policies