From Early Requirements Analysis towards Secure Workflows

Requirements engineering is a key step in the software development process that has little counterpart in the development of business processes for web services. Furthermore, the existing design methodologies for web services do not address the issue of developing secure web services, secure business processes and secure workflows. This paper presents a methodology that allows a business process designer to derive the skeleton of the concrete secure business processes from the early requirements analysis. The proposed refinement methodology aims to obtain an appropriate coarse grained secure business process that can be further refined into workflows. We introduce a specification language for secure business processes, which is a dialect of WS-BPEL for the functional parts and abstracts away low level implementation details from WS-Security and WS-Federation specifications. To make the discussion more concrete, we illustrate the proposal with an e-business banking case study.