The Consistency of Task-Based Authorization Constraints in Workflow Systems

Workflow management systems (WFMSs) have attracted a lot of interest both in academia and the business community. A workflow consists of a collection of tasks that are organized to facilitate some business process specification. To simplify the complexity of security administration, it is common to use role-based access control (RBAC) to grant authorization to roles and users. Typically, security policies are expressed as constraints on users, roles, tasks and the workflow itself. A workflow system can become very complex and involve several organizations or different units of an organization, thus the number of security policies may be very large and their interactions very complex. It is clearly important to know whether the existence of such constraints will prevent certain instances of the workflow from completing. Unfortunately, no existing constraint models have considered this problem satisfactorily. In this paper we define a model for constrained workflow systems that includes...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: CSFW
• Authors: Kaijun Tan, Jason Crampton, Carl A. Gunter
• Keywords: Constrained Workflow, Constrained Workflow Authorization, CSFW 2004, Security Privacy, Workflow