Design of an Integrated Role-Based Access Control Infrastructure for Adaptive Workflow Systems

Abstract

With increasing numbers of organizations automating their business processes by using workflow systems, security aspects of workflow systems has become a heavily researched area. Also, most workflow processes nowadays need to be adaptive, i.e., constantly changing, to meet changing business conditions. However, little attention has been paid to integrating Security and Adaptive Workflow. In this paper, we investigate this important research topic, with emphasis on Role Based Access Control (RBAC) in Adaptive Workflow. Based on our earlier work on a 3-tier adaptive workflow architecture, we present the design of a similar 3-tier RBAC infrastructure, and we show that it conceptually mirrors our adaptive workflow architecture. We also describe the mappings between them, and we show how this mapping can be used to manage organizational RBAC constraints when the workflows are being adapted continuously. We illustrate our ideas throughout the paper with a simple yet non-trivial example.