Analysis of security‐relevant semantics of BPEL in cross‐domain defined business processes

Aims to identify security‐relevant semantics of business processes being defined by WS‐BPEL (Web Services Business Process Execution Language, BPEL for short) scripts, in particular, when such scripts defining collaborative business processes on top of web services are deployed across security domain boundaries.

Analysing potential of BPEL to define behaviour of business processes violating restrictions implied by security policies.

Semantic patterns being combinations of particular BPEL features and web services with specific access restrictions implied by security policies are defined and their implications for analysis of BPEL scripts during compliance assessment of cross‐domain defined business processes are identified.

The results of the research part of which is reported here have been applied in a research prototype to BPEL scripts of limited size and comparatively simple business logic. Real‐world examples of BPEL scripts with respect to size and complexity should be examined for further approving suitability of the algorithms used.

The results can be used to specify security policies in terms of security‐critical semantics of BPEL scripts in order to facilitate compliance assessment. In conjunction with other results of this research, this will help to overcome security issues arising from cross‐domain definition of business processes by enabling automatic compliance assessment prior to execution.