Model Checking of Security-Sensitive Business Processes

Security-sensitive business processes are business processes that must comply with security requirements (e.g. authorization constraints). In previous works it has been shown that model checking can be profitably used for the automatic analysis of security-sensitive business processes. But building a formal model that simultaneously accounts for both the workflow and the access control policy is a time consuming and error-prone activity. In this paper we present a new approach to model checking security-sensitive business processes that allows for the separate specification of the workflow and of the associated security policy while retaining the ability to carry out a fully automatic analysis of the process. To illustrate the effectiveness of the approach we describe its application to a version of the Loan Origination Process featuring an RBAC access control policy extended with delegation.