Automated analysis of infinite state workflows with access control policies

Business processes are usually specified by workflows extended with access control policies. In previous works, automated techniques have been developed for the analysis of authorization constraints of workflows. One of main drawback of available approaches is that only a bounded number of workflow instances is considered and analyses are limited to consider intra-instance authorization constraints. Instead, in applications, several workflow instances execute concurrently, may synchronize, and be required to ensure inter-instance constraints. Performing an analysis by considering a finite but arbitrary number of workflow instances can give designers a higher confidence about the quality of their business process. In this paper, we propose an automated technique for the analysis of both intra- and inter-instance authorization constraints in workflow systems. We reduce the analysis problem to a model checking problem, parametric in the number of workflow instances, and identify a sub-class of workflow systems with a decidable analysis problem. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.