Abstract
Business processes modeling and management solutions provide powerful abstraction mechanisms for the control flow of complex, task-driven applications, and as such allow for better alignment with business-related concerns. Despite the existence and wide adoption of standardized business process management languages such as WS-BPEL and BPMN 2.0, workflow engines in current Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings are in practice more restricted, in part for reasons such as vendor lock-in, but also due to restrictions of multi-tenant environments.
In this paper, we explore the main security-related problems caused by offering BPMN2-compliant workflow engines in a multi-tenant PaaS environment, particularly focusing on threats caused by misbehaving tenants and the lack of proper tenant isolation. In addition, we propose a service-level tenant isolation framework that allows PaaS offerings to support workflow engines which comply with the BPMN 2.0 standard, and we discuss the technical feasibility of implementing this framework using Java technologies such as OSGi and the Resource Consumption Management API (JSR-284).
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- 1.
This is required by the BPMN 2.0 specification for some types of tasks.
- 2.
The acronym stands for six threat categories namely Spoofing, Tampering with Data, Repudiation, Information Disclosure, Denial of Service and Elevation of Privilege.
- 3.
This is required for portability of tenant applications to other instances of the same BPMN 2.0 engine where the tenant isolation framework is not used.
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Acknowledgement
This research is partially funded by the Research Fund KU Leuven (project GOA/14/003 - ADDIS), the strategic basic research (SBO) project DeCoMAdS, and the MuDCads O&O project.
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Makki, M., Van Landuyt, D., Joosen, W. (2018). Towards PaaS Offering of BPMN 2.0 Engines: A Proposal for Service-Level Tenant Isolation. In: Mann, Z., Stolz, V. (eds) Advances in Service-Oriented and Cloud Computing. ESOCC 2017. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 824. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-79090-9_1
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