Designing secure business processes with SecBPMN

Modern information systems are increasingly large and consist of an interplay of technical components and social actors (humans and organizations). Such interplay threatens the security of the overall system and calls for verification techniques that enable determining compliance with security policies. Existing verification frameworks either have a limited expressiveness that inhibits the specification of real-world requirements or rely on formal languages that are difficult to use for most analysts. In this paper, we overcome the limitations of existing approaches by presenting the SecBPMN framework. Our proposal includes: (1) the SecBPMN-ml modeling language, a security-oriented extension of BPMN for specifying composite information systems; (2) the SecBPMN-Q query language for representing security policies; and (3) a query engine that enables checking SecBPMN-Q policies against SecBPMN-ml specifications. We evaluate our approach by studying its understandability and perceived comp...