A Chinese wall security model for decentralized workflow systems

Abstract

Workflow systems are gaining importance as an infrastructure for automating inter-organizational interactions, such as those in Electronic Commerce. Execution of inter-organiz-ational workflows may raise a number of security issues including those related to conflict-of-interest among competing organizations. Moreover, in such an environment, a centralized Workflow Management System is not desirable because: (i) it can be a performance bottleneck, and (ii) the systems are inherently distributed, heterogeneous and autonomous in nature. In this paper, we propose an approach to realize decentralized workflow execution, in which the workflow is divided into partitions called self-describing workflows, and handled by a light weight workflow management component, called workflow stub, located at each organizational agent. We argue that placing the task execution agents that belong to the same conflict-of-interest class in one self-describing workflow may lead to unfair, and in some cases, undesirable results, akin to being on the wrong side of the Chinese wall. We propose a Chinese wall security model for the decentralized workflow environment to resolve such problems, and a restrictive partitioning solution to enforce the proposed model.