A framework for integrated secure control and document flows for Business Process Management Systems

Business process management systems (BPMS) are often defined through explicit control flows. The variety of the different services proposed by BPMS and the nature of many business processes require taking into consideration the documents that are important in defining dependencies between process activities. The use of these documents throughout the whole process should be done in a secure way. Integrating control and secure document flows in the design of Business Processes gives more visibility, flexibility and trust to the models. It also facilitates the control of the execute on of business processes. This paper explains the importance of secure documents in business process management. It presents a framework that introduces a new method of designing the control flow and document flow perspectives of business processes. The framework generates a new model that integrates these two perspectives. Business process security requirements are expressed in the proposed models. The models use the Petri net formalism that is used by our framework to allow the designer to validate security properties in addition to other desirable requirements.