A New Task Engineering Approach for Workflow Access Control

Security and particularly Access control is a crucial issue for workflow management systems (WFMS). RBAC (Role based Access Control) model seems to be suitable for enforcing access control policies in such systems. However, without an effective role engineering process -at administration time- that aims to reduce conflicting situations. using RBAC could be more complex and less useful. Additionally to role engineering, a `task engineering' process at run time- could be useful to allow the satisfaction of access control constraints in even critical situations. In this paper, we identify task engineering as a process to examine the granularity of each workflow's task in a way to meet at run time- the main workflow access control requirements, precisely the least privilege and separation of duties principles. Then, we propose an approach of task engineering to improve security enforcement in WFMS. This approach uses an intelligent method namely the Constraints Satisfaction Problem (CSP) formulation and resolution method.