Cerberus: Automated Synthesis of Enforcement Mechanisms for Security-Sensitive Business Processes

Cerberus is a tool to automatically synthesize run-time enforcement mechanisms for security-sensitive Business Processes (BPs). The tool is capable of guaranteeing that the execution constraints \(EC \) on the tasks together with the authorization policy \(AP \) and the authorization constraints \(AC \) are satisfied while ensuring that the process can successfully terminate. Cerberus can be easily integrated in many workflow management systems, it is transparent to process designers, and does not require any knowledge beyond usual BP modeling. The tool works in two phases. At design-time, the enforcement mechanism M, parametric in the authorization policy \(AP \), is generated from \(EC \) and \(AC \); M can thus be used with any instance of the same BP provided that \(EC \) and \(AC \) are left unchanged. At run-time, a specific authorization policy is added to M, thereby obtaining an enforcement mechanism \(M^*\) dedicated to a particular instance of the security-sensitive business process. To validate our approach, we discuss the implementation and usage of Cerberus in the SAP HANA Operational Intelligence platform.