Security requirement analysis of business processes

Economic globalization leads to complex decentralized company structures calling for the extensive use of distributed IT-systems. The business processes of a company have to reflect these changes of infrastructure. In particular, due to new electronic applications and the inclusion of a higher number of—potentially unknown—persons, the business processes are more vulnerable against malicious attacks than traditional processes. Thus, a business should undergo a security analysis. Here, the vulnerabilities of the business process are recognized, the risks resulting from the vulnerabilities are calculated, and suitable safeguards reducing the vulnerabilities are selected. Unfortunately, a security analysis tends to be complex and affords expensive security expert support. In order to reduce the expense and to enable domain experts with in-depth insight in business processes but with limited knowledge about security to develop secure business processes, we developed the framework MoSS_BP facilitating the handling of business process security requirements from their specification to their realization. In particular, MoSS _BP provides graphical concepts to specify security requirements, repositories of various mechanisms enforcing the security requirements, and a collection of reference models and case studies enabling the modification of the business processes. In this paper, the MoSS _BP -framework is presented. Additionally, we introduce a tool supporting the MoSS_BP-related security analysis of business processes and the incorporation of safeguards. This tool is based on object-oriented process models and acts with graph rewrite systems. Finally, we clarify the application of the MoSS_BP-framework by means of a business process for tender-handling which is provided by anonymity-preserving safeguards. Peter Herrmann studied computer science at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany (diploma in 1990). Afterwards, he worked as a Ph.D. student (doctorate in 1997) and postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Networks and Distributed Systems Group of the Computer Science Department at the University of Dortmund, Germany. Since 2005 he is a full professor for formal methods at the Department for Telematics of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. His research interests include the formal-based development of networked systems and the engineering of distributed services. Moreover, he is interested in security and trust aspects of component structured distributed software. Gaby Herrmann studied computer science at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany (diploma in 1991). Afterwards, she worked as a researcher in the Communication Group and the Information Systems Group at University of Duisburg-Essen (Doctorate in 2001, topic: security of business processes). Since 2000 she works as executive secretary at the Department of Economics, Business Studies and Computer Sciences at the same university.     

Modeling languages for business processes and business rules: A representational analysis

Process modeling and rule modeling languages are both used to document organizational policies and procedures. To date, their synergies and overlap are under-researched. Understanding the relationship between the two modeling types would allow organizations to maximize synergies, avoid content duplication, and thus reduce their overall modeling effort. In this paper, we use the Bunge–Wand–Weber (BWW) representation theory to compare the representation capabilities of process and rule modeling languages. We perform a representational analysis of four rule modeling specifications: The Simple Rule Markup Language (SRML), the Semantic Web Rules Language (SWRL), the Production Rule Representation (PRR), and the Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules (SBVR) specification. We compare their BWW representation capabilities with those of four popular conceptual process modeling languages. In our analysis, we focus on the aspects of maximum ontological completeness and minimum ontological overlap. The outcome of this study shows that no single language is internally complete with respect to the BWW representation model. We also show that a combination of two languages, in particular SRML and BPMN, appears to be better suited for combined process and rule modeling than any of these modeling languages used independently.     

Discovery and analysis of e-mail-driven business processes

E-mail is used as the primary tool for business communication and collaboration. This paper presents a novel e-mail interaction mining method to discover and analyze e-mail-driven business processes. An e-mail-driven business process is perceived as a human collaboration process that consists of interactions between people who may each play different roles. The notion of message threads (i.e. sets of e-mail messages that are replies to each other) is used as the fundamental building block to construct the interactions in the e-mail-driven business process. The proposed method adopts an interaction-centric business process modeling language to visualize the discovered e-mail-driven business process. The method identifies message threads from an e-mail archive, and constructs an interaction-centric process model based on the temporal order and similarity of the threads. Process-related information is extracted from e-mail header fields. A software tool, named E-mail Interaction Miner, implements the proposed method. A case study is used to apply and evaluate the method on a set of e-mails collected from a Dutch gas transport company. The evaluation results are discussed. These results comprise business process improvement opportunities for the case organization, and contributions to theory and language development.     

Change impact analysis in service-based business processes

In the service-oriented computing paradigm, business processes can be wrapped and exposed as business services. Business processes and services are subject to changes required by the organizational and regulatory policies changes. A required service change can affect its supporting business processes, and a change occurred in business process can affect the services it supports. In this study, we will provide some insights on the challenging issue in the service-based business process change management. Different from the existing work in the field of workflow change management, this work focuses on the analysis of dependencies between services and their supporting business processes. We present a taxonomy for the changes that can happen in services and business processes based on the proposed service-oriented business process model. A set of change impact patterns are defined based on the study of the dependencies between services and business processes and the identified change types. These change types and the impact patterns then can be used to analyze the necessary change propagation occurring in business processes and services. We provide algorithms for determining the impact scopes affected by the service and process change. A prototype that implements the proposed change management mechanisms is developed.     

Security and privacy in business networking

Business networking relies on application-specific quantity and quality of information in order to support social infrastructures in, e.g., energy allocation coordinated by smart grids, healthcare services with electronic health records, traffic management with personal sensors, RFID in retail and logistics, or integration of individuals’ social network information into good, services, and rescue operations. Due to the increasing reliance of networking applications on sharing ICT services, dependencies threaten privacy, security, and reliability of information and, thus, innovative business applications in smart societies. Resilience is becoming a new security approach, since it takes dependencies into account and aims at achieving equilibriums in case of opposite requirements. This special issue on 'Security and Privacy in Business Networking' contributes to the journal 'Electronic Markets' by introducing a different view on achieving acceptable secure business networking applications in spite of threats due to covert channels. This view is on adapting resilience to enforcement of IT security in business networking applications. Our analysis shows that privacy is an evidence to measure and improve trustworthy relationships and reliable interactions between participants of business processes and their IT systems. The articles of this special issue, which have been accepted after a double-blind peer review, contribute to this view on interdisciplinary security engineering in regard to the stages of security and privacy requirements analysis, enforcement of resulting security requirements for an information exchange, testing with a privacy-preserving detection of policy violations, and knowledge management for the purpose of keeping business processes resilient.     

Automated analysis of concurrent systems with the constrainedexpression toolset

The constrained expression approach to analysis of concurrent software systems can be used with a variety of design and programming languages and does not require a complete enumeration of the set of reachable states of the concurrent system. The construction of a toolset automating the main constrained expression analysis techniques and the results of experiments with that toolset are reported. The toolset is capable of carrying out completely automated analyses of a variety of concurrent systems, starting from source code in an Ada-like design language and producing system traces displaying the properties represented bv the analysts queries. The strengths and weaknesses of the toolset and the approach are assessed on both theoretical and empirical grounds     

Extending the reach of business processes

A business process is a systematic set of activities by which an enterprise conducts its affairs. Various technologies-including pagers, cell phones, pocket PCs, instant messaging (IM), and the short message service (SMS)-have emerged that people can use to communicate even when they are on the move or far away. Many such devices support synchronous communication as well as proactively "pushing" messages to users. However, these devices have no mechanism to control or structure the information that users are exchanging, and they arc not integrated with business processes based on workplaces. To address these problems, we have designed and implemented PerCollab, a middleware system that facilitates structured collaboration between various communication devices for business processes and pushes tasks to users.     

The representation,analysis and verification of business processes: a metagraph-based approach

Business processes can be modeled using a variety of schemes such as Petri Nets, Metagraphs and UML Activity Diagrams. When information analysis is as important an objective as the proper sequencing of tasks, the metagraph formalism is the most appropriate. In practice, however, metagraphs have not achieved wide popularity. Here we propose a modification of the original formulation that eliminates some of the inconveniences that have hindered the use of this technique. We represent a business process as a Task-Precedence Metagraph (TPMG), which is a type of AND/OR graph. A TPMG is similar to a metagraph but is visually clearer and more appealing, and the algorithmic procedures are graphical rather than algebraic. We first describe the proposed representation scheme for TPMGs and present a simple graph-search algorithm for the analysis of information flow. This can be readily extended to perform task analysis, resource analysis, and operational (i.e., semantic) verification. We then present a generalized graphical algorithm for structural (i.e., syntactic) verification that runs correctly not only on TPMGs containing directed cycles, but even on those that have overlapping patterns. Editor-in-Chief’s Note: An earlier version of this paper was accepted for WITS2004. The authors were subsequently invited to submit an expanded paper for publication consideration in Information Technology and Management. The conference co-chairs, Professors Amit Dutta and Paulo Goes were the guest editors for this paper.     

Event tunnel: exploring event-driven business processes

Event-based systems monitor business processes in real time. The event-tunnel visualization sees the stream of events captured from such systems as a cylindrical tunnel. The tunnel allows for back-tracing business incidents and exploring event patterns' root causes. The authors couple this visualization with tools that let users search for relevant events within a data repository.     

A privacy threat analysis framework: supporting the elicitation and fulfillment of privacy requirements

Ready or not, the digitalization of information has come, and privacy is standing out there, possibly at stake. Although digital privacy is an identified priority in our society, few systematic, effective methodologies exist that deal with privacy threats thoroughly. This paper presents a comprehensive framework to model privacy threats in software-based systems. First, this work provides a systematic methodology to model privacy-specific threats. Analogous to STRIDE, an information flow–oriented model of the system is leveraged to guide the analysis and to provide broad coverage. The methodology instructs the analyst on what issues should be investigated, and where in the model those issues could emerge. This is achieved by (i) defining a list of privacy threat types and (ii) providing the mappings between threat types and the elements in the system model. Second, this work provides an extensive catalog of privacy-specific threat tree patterns that can be used to detail the threat analysis outlined above. Finally, this work provides the means to map the existing privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) to the identified privacy threats. Therefore, the selection of sound privacy countermeasures is simplified.     

MAMBA: Automatic customization of computerized business processes

Due to recent market challenges organizational researchers have developed a variety of strategies how organizations can continuously survive in highly dynamic, sometimes even hostile environments. One of the most important strategies aims to enhance the flexibility of enterprises through widespread decentralization, while another well-known approach advocates customer orientation through systematic business process (re-) engineering. This paper addresses organizational flexibility and business process orientation from the perspective of information systems. It starts from a requirements analysis which investigates the challenges of contemporary organizational strategies and then proceeds towards an approach that supports the flexible modeling of business processes by linking decentralized organizational procedures. For this purpose a set of process modeling and process interaction operators is defined. These operators also allow to automatically create and customize configurations of computerized business processes. This progress in cooperative information processing technology contributes significantly to the recently emerged concept of the computerized enterprise. The concepts are presented in the context of a banking application, namely the Credit Advisory Subsystem of our banking application MAMBA.     

Anomaly detection in business processes logs using social network analysis

Journal of Computer Virology and Hacking Techniques - This paper presents an approach to detect anomalies in process-aware information systems. This approach is based on process mining and uses...     

Disnix: A toolset for distributed deployment

The process of deploying a distributed system in a network of machines is often very complex, laborious and time-consuming, while it is hard to guarantee that the system will work as expected and that specific non-functional deployment requirements from the domain are supported. In this paper we describe the Disnix toolset, which provides system administrators or developers with automatic deployment of a distributed system in a network of machines from declarative specifications and offers properties such as complete dependencies, atomic upgrades and rollbacks to make this process efficient and reliable. Disnix has an extensible architecture, allowing the integration of custom modules to make the deployment more convenient and suitable for the domain in which the system is to be used. Disnix has been under development for almost four years and has been applied to several types of distributed systems, including an industrial case study.     

Information supply for business processes: coupling workflow with document analysis and information retrieval

Explicit modeling of business processes and their enactment in workflow systems have proved to be valuable in increasing the efficiency of work in organizations. We argue that enacted business processes — i.e. workflow management systems — form a solid basis for adequate information support in complex and knowledge-intensive business processes. To support this claim we demonstrate results from two different projects.The VirtualOffice approach employs workflow-context information to support high-precision document analysis and understanding in standard office settings; the combination of workflow context and document analysis allows for the automatic handling of incoming paper mail with respect to the appropriate workflows.The KnowMore approach focuses on the support of people who work on knowledge-intensive tasks by automatic delivery of relevant and goal-specific information. To this end, workflow context, an extended process model, and a detailed modeling of information sources are combined.     

A toolset for building the virtual enterprise

Much research has been undertaken to define what a virtual enterprise is and how it should work. This paper addresses the specific question, how a virtual enterprise can be designed to have the agility to support short-term business opportunities. A framework is presented for the organizational design and the changing business roles of the business architect who constructs the various phases of the virtual enterprises lifecycle. This infrastructure for creating virtual enterprises is referred to as the value system designer; a set of methods and tools to select partners, re-engineer business- and logistic processes and to set up an information and communication platform for the virtual enterprise. The methods and tools have been developed in two longitudial research projects TELEflow and the Virtuelle Fabrik between 1995 and 1999. Focusing on the experiences gained from numerous cases, a summary on crucial success factors for designing virtual enterprises shall be presented. Thus, this paper gives insights and applicable know-how for companies and managing engineers in their role as virtual enterprise architects, for example leaders of project consortia or joint ventures or as first-tier suppliers co-ordinating supplier (sub-) nets.     

基于深度学习的融合流程多视角行为分析:预测业务流程监控

预测性业务流程监控（PBPM）是业务流程管理（BPM）中的一个重要研究领域,旨在准确预测未来的行为事件。目前,PBPM研究中广泛引用了深度学习方法,但大多数方法只考虑单一的事件-控制流视角,无法将属性-数据流视角与之结合进行流程预测。针对这一问题,提出了一种基于双层BERT神经网络和融合流程多视角行为分析方法（简称FMP框架）。首先,基于第一层BERT学习属性-数据流信息;接着,基于第二层BERT学习事件-行为控制流信息;最后,通过FMP框架融合数据流和控制流实现多维视角流程预测。在真实的事件日志中的实验结果表明,相比其他研究方法,基于FPM框架预测下一个事件的活动精度更高。这证明融合流程多视角的FMP框架能够更全面、更深层次地分析复杂的流程行为,并提高预测的性能。