SecureFlow: a secure Web-enabled workflow management system

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to present a web-based Workflow Management System (WFMS), called SecureFlow that can serve as a framework for specification and enforcement of complex security policies within a workflow, such as separation of duties. The main advantage of SecureFlow is that it uses a simple 4GL language such as SQL to specify authorization constraints, thereby improving flexibility and user-friendliness. Due to the modular nature of the SecureFlow architecture, the security specification and enforcement modules can be layered on top of existing workflow systems that do not provide adequate support for security. SecureFlow relies on the Workflow Authorization Model (WAM) recently proposed by Atluri and Huang.