Auditing Security of Information Flows

Information security embedded in the design of telematics systems

1 IntroductionDuring its evolution, humanity always looked for instruments and innovative solutions that ensure maximum comfort from the perspective of human universe dimensions: familial, social, cultural, economic, religious etc. Many times during this social development, the individual had to resort to various association forms with others in order to achieve these goals, thus laying the foundation for what we call today collaboration. Current forms of association transcend the original goals and the individual aspirations have been altered and transposed into mercantile organization objectives. Unconditional support of these considerations is reflected by the capitalist system and largely by the industrial system, where the aim of earning money through all means outweighs any attempt of collaboration in the original meaning. Unfortunately the mercantilism is not only an economic doctrine of 15th-18th centuries, but it is still fully manifest in the digital society.Beyond these considerations, thinking of the social and economic status quo we must notice a change in the business paradigm. The traditional models defined through the goal of maximizing the profit adapt to modern management doctrines, oriented towards the individuals. Current society is not only information and knowledge based; it is also a society of technology and artificial intelligence. Transposing the business in the digital environment is no longer a caprice but a need. Additionally, the simple presence in virtual environment is not the premise for the success of modern business, the advantages provided by technology must also be fully exploited.Orientation towards exploiting individual abilities and ensuring business processes flexibility has led to what specialists call business agility. Ensuring a certain level of agility for the business requires more and more relying on information and communications technology. Additionally, the agile business status implies redefining the human resource as primary production factor. The anthropocentric paradigm is evidence to this. In the context of modern agile business collaboration and team work are more than ever necessary. Through the prism of dedicated agility technologies, the essence of collaboration as instrument for founding and unfolding economic activities dissolves into the business itself, becoming visible on the level of business processes and work tasks. The individuals, activities, processes and work tasks are vertices of informational graphs representing the functioning of modern businesses. The edges of these graphs are merely informational flows (later translated into workflows) that ensure communication and cooperation on business level for reaching its goals.For technological and economic reasons (meaning resource economy), the need to share resources, skills, competencies, market shares and experience overlays on top of these modern business architecture. In many occasions this was a premise for development of virtual organizations that take advantage of concrete market opportunities. The modern technological solutions is now provided by cloud computing. Together with a workflow management system (WfMS), cloud computing comes to ensure scalability, reutilization of technological capabilities, reliability, improvement of business processes, minimization of information and communications technology (ICT) investment.Thus, exploitation of cloud services may generate an intensified use of workflows, mainly for collaborative environments. On the other hand, business agility built on service-oriented architecture (SOA) and complex event processing (CEP) solutions may ensure real time collaboration between business processes through processing heterogeneous data extracted from business connected information flows. A solution of workflow management system based on cloud for real time collaboration will provide the capabilities for multi-criterion analyses for business processes, while considering their interdependence with the environment. …

Business processes and information systems mutually affect each other in non-trivial ways. Frequently, the business process design and the information system design are not well aligned. This means that business processes are designed without taking the information system impact into account, and vice versa. Missing alignment at design time often results in quality problems at runtime, such as large response times of information systems, large process execution times, overloaded information systems or interrupted processes. Aligning business process quality and information system quality at design time requires to
\nsolve the following problems (P). Business process quality and information system quality have to be characterized. P1: In contrast to information system quality, which is specified in the ISO/IEC 9126 standard, for example, there is no common and comprehensive understanding of business process quality. P2: Beyond that, current business process
\nmodeling notations do not aim to represent quality aspects. The impact of a business process on the quality of an information system, and vice versa, is unknown at design
\ntime. P3: The mutual impact between business processes and information systems must be predicted at design time.
\nIn this thesis, the Business Process Quality Reference-Model (BPQRM), a quality model for business processes, is introduced. The model allows for a comprehensive characterization of business process quality (P1). The BPQRM is applied successfully in a case study to
\nidentify potential for process quality improvement in practice. Based on the BPQRM an existing process modeling notation is extended by model elements to represent quality
\naspects (P2). Simulation is a powerful means to predict the impact of a business process on the quality of an information system, and vice versa, at design time. This thesis proposes two simulation approaches to predict the mutual impact between business processes and information systems, in terms of performance (P3). The approach Business
\nIT Impact Simulation (BIIS) defines interfaces between the business process simulation and the information system simulation. Performance-relevant information is exchanged
\nvia the interfaces between both simulations. Using business process simulation and information system simulation in isolation, workload burstiness is not adequately reflected.
\nThis is especially true for occasional, volatile peak loads. Workload burstiness can significantly affect the performance of business processes and information systems. The approach Integrated Business IT Impact Simulation (IntBIIS) for the integration of business processes and information systems in a single simulation allows for reflecting workload burstiness correctly. The simulation approaches support the comparison of design alternatives and the verification of a certain design against requirements. A case study confirms the feasibility in practice and the acceptance from practitioners’ point of
\nview.

IoT-aware business processes are gaining momentum as part of an effort to exploit the potential of IoT technology in the business process management field. The conventional lifecycle of a business process (BP) consists of several phases, from modeling and analysis down to implementation, monitoring and optimization. The availability of widely used standard notations for BP modeling, such as BPMN, allows business analysts to specify their BPs and get the corresponding implementations in an effective and largely automated way. Introducing IoT technologies from the BP design phase proves to bring significant improvements in terms of BP efficiency but also difficulties, when it comes to deal with the complexity and heterogeneity of such technologies at BP modeling time. This paper proposes an approach, named Process over Things (PoT), that aims at overcoming such difficulties by using a standardized ontology to deal with IoT interaction at BP modeling and design time. The proposed approach introduces a BPMN extension to explicitly address the IoT ontology in the BPMN model, yet being independent of the specific ontology implementation. A technology named PoT Broker is also introduced to fill the gap between the BP execution platform and the IoT devices access layer. The PoT Broker also obtains a significant level of automation when implementing IoT-aware BPs making use of a specific IoT ontology. The paper describes the architecture of the PoT approach and illustrates its application to a case study dealing with a weather alert system.

The article examines the peculiarities of business process management in the hotel industry. It was found that the model that combines business processes in the hotel industry includes three main processes ‒ provision of accommodation, food services and, depending on the category of the temporary accommodation facility, additional services.It has been proven that management business processes consist of: management, marketing and financial processes, the main (accommodation, food and additional services (entertainment, wellness, business services, etc.) create the value of the hotel service/goods, why the hotel receives core profit Supporting business processes ensure the efficiency of core business processes. Development business processes create profit in current activities but are aimed at obtaining benefits and profit in the future, ensure the development of the hotel, etc.The purpose, tasks and advantages of business planning in the hotel industry are revealed.It has been proven that to assess the definition of the level of business processes that take place in the hotel industry of the state, it is appropriate to use the matrix method, which is calculated on general and integral indicators. The application of this method allows not only to determine the main leaders and the place in the competition, which is evaluated by the criterion of the maximum points scored, but also to quantitatively assess the lag behind the region with the best level of business processes. The existing methodology involves the use of four key factors: social, client, financial and personnel.Using the matrix method, the integral indicator of business processes in the hotel industry of three southern regions of Ukraine ‒ Kherson, Mykolayiv and Odesa ‒ was evaluated. It was revealed that the rating of the regions for the implementation of business processes in the hotel industry was distributed according to the integral indicator as follows: the Mykolayiv region takes the 1st place, the Odesa region takes the 2nd place, and the Kherson region takes the 3rd place. The Odesa region has a strong position in terms of social and personnel components, and the Kherson region has the best position in terms of the client (tourist) component. For the calculations, 12 key evaluation indicators were used, charac-terizing individual components of the region's potential. Keywords:business process, hotel business, hotel, model, matrix method, points method

Proposal of Organization Framework Model, using Business Processes and Hierarchical Patterns to provide Agility and Flexibility in Competitiveness Environments

Business process modelling is an important part of system design. When designing or redesigning a business process, stakeholders specify, negotiate, and agree on business requirements to be satisfied, including non-functional requirements that concern the quality of the business process. This thesis addresses the question of how to specify and compute the quality of a business process, given the model that stakeholders use. The motivation for this thesis is the increasing importance of the quality of business processes. Knowing the quality of specific business processes enables stakeholders to judge if these processes need improvement. Knowing the quality of the constructs of those processes (viz., events, inputs, activities, and outputs) and the way they are structured enables a more detailed analysis of their shortcomings and provides a basis for the design of improvements. The research challenge of this thesis is grounded in the assumption that: “Organisations need an appropriate means to effectively compute achievement of their goals and objectives by their business processes.” Given this challenge, the main research question on which this thesis focuses is: “Can the quality of a business process be computed quantitatively at different levels of granularity?” The research objective is: “To develop frameworks, factors, and metrics for computing non-functional requirements (quality) of business processes quantitatively at different levels of granularity.” The outcomes of this thesis are: 1) BPIMM, a language-independent business process integrating meta-model, based on the concepts of seven mainstream business process modelling languages: BPMN, EPC, RAD, UML AD, SADT, IDEF0, and IDEF3. 2) BPC-QC (Business Process Concept - Quality Computation), an approach to quality computation at the lowest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BPC-QEF (Business Process Concept - Quality Evaluation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of the constructs of a business process: event, input, activity, and output. ii. A set of business process quality dimensions and factors. The following quality dimensions are distinguished: performance, efficiency, reliability, recoverability, permissibility, and availability. Each dimension categorises different quality aspects in terms of factors. A non-exhaustive set of sixteen quantitative factors is provided. iii. Quality metrics for each of the quality factors, to facilitate a quantitative computation of the quality of a specific construct of a business process. 3) BP-QC (Business Process - Quality Computation), an approach to compute the quality at the highest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BP-CQCF (Business Process - Compositional Quality Computation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of a business process as a whole, given the quality of its constructs. ii. A set of generic business process modelling patterns to decompose a business process into more succinct parts, namely: sequential, parallel with synchronisation, exclusive, inclusive, simple loop, and complex loop. iii. A set of over one hundred computational formulae. For each combination of modelling pattern and a quality factor, there is a formula to compute the quality. 4) AAV (Approach to Application and Validation), an evaluation plan to evaluate BPIMM, BPC-QC and BP-QC in practice, together with expert stakeholders. The plan consists of the units of measure, a measurement model, and a case study procedure. To evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis to real world business needs, four case studies have been conducted in different environments: a Dutch educational institution, a global financial institution, an international financial service provider, and a Dutch research project on crisis management. Each of these case studies concerns a different, single business process. This thesis shows that: 1) A quality computation approach can be adopted independent of a business process modelling language. 2) Quantitative quality factors can be introduced specifically for the constructs of a business process. 3) Quantitative metrics and computational formulae can be developed for specific quality factors, allowing the computation of different aspects of the quality of a business process quantitatively at different levels of granularity. 4) An evaluation plan can be developed to evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis (viz., BPIMM, BPC-QC, and BP-QC). The contributions of this thesis are designed to be beneficial to the areas of business and management, requirements engineering, software engineering, and business process modelling. In the areas of requirements engineering and software engineering, these contributions are intended to help practitioners to consider non-functional requirements at the earliest stage. In the area of business process modelling, information systems, service computing, and cloud computing, the contributions can be used for quality-driven modelling, design, and redesign. To conclude, knowing the quality value of a business process at different levels of granularity provides a basis for its improvement.

The article focuses on studying and implementing a method of assigning access rights to the applications in a corporate mobile network with different requirements for security, which will allow considering the specific activities of multiple users. The existing solutions for assigning access rights to applications and services of the intranet are analyzed, the need to create a method that ensures information security when implementing access in corporate networks with different requirements for the level of security is substantiated. Due to the results of analysis of trends and development prospects of modern corporate mobile networks there has been found a contradiction between the requirements for information security of universal mobile devices with access to secure services and technical capabilities of information security systems that ensure access security in the corporate networks with different security requirements. To solve the problem, a multi-user system has been implemented that ensures operation of any computer equipment and mobile devices of an organization whose DBMS has a client-server architecture. The functional requirements for the developed method include the ability to perform user authorization, providing the administrator with the ability to manage user access rights to various applications, managing application storage, recording user operations, and keeping records. In the course of the software implementation of the method of assigning access rights, the design of the database is described in stages, a model of information flows is built, a physical diagram of the interaction of individual procedures is considered, on the basis of which the database is created, a user interface with forms that display information stored in the database is developed.

This paper describes the problem of determining whether plans for a population genetic database in Iceland met statutory information security requirements. It discusses the approach taken by the relevant governmental authority, which involved employing technical standards to solve the problem. By examining the background to the project, and the main challenges it faced, the paper aims to draw out insights and lessons to inform the way in which future projects are designed and governed. It reflects critically on the results of trying to meet legal requirements for information security by using technical information security standards. Particular attention is given to the founding legislation of the project, and the court case that eventually found that legislation to be unconstitutional.

Information security is strongly dependent on access control models and cryptographic techniques. These are well established areas of research and practice in the enforcement of technical information security policies but are not capable of supporting development of comprehensive information security within organizations. Therefore, there is a need to study upper level issues to establish organizational models for specifying security enforcement mechanisms and coordinating policies. This paper proposes a model for dealing with high level information security policies. The core is to enforce a continuous refinement of information security requirements aiming at formally deriving technical security policies from high level security objectives. This refinement is carried out by in formation security harmonization functions. Contribution of this paper is on the specification of a notation for expressing information security requirements and on the specification of a mechanism to formulate harmonization functions.

With the development of software technology, software security is receiving more and more attention. Security requirement is a key stage in the process of software development. In the present research, we propose a method to elicit security requirements; that is developed based on safety knowledge base. In the method, we perform analysis based on the asset, threat and Common Criteria security function components. Then, we summarize the relationship of the three. Based on this, we establish a safety knowledge base. Starting from the functional requirements of the application system, the system assets will be analyzed and matched automatically based on the established safety knowledge base, and finally we elicit the security requirements. The approach is very effective for the purpose of security requirement analysis, and elicits security requirements easily and efficiently. It will be very helpful for security software development.KeywordsSecurity RequirementsAssetThreatSecurity Functional ComponentCommon Criteria

Many scholars view the emerging business model concept as the missing link between a company’s strategy and its operational implementation into business processes. They remain vague, however, in answering the question as to how strategy-induced changes to the business model can be transformed into business process adjustments. The other way round—a feedback mechanism that triggers business model adjustments in case of issues at the business process level—is not conceptualized either. The study hence is twofold. The authors explore both the top-down (business model to business process) and the bottom-up (business process to business model) perspective of this interface. The top-down part considers business model changes, such as induced by adopting a Software-as-a-Service strategy, which require an effective implementation in a firm’s organization. The explorative findings cover a detailed description of the transformation framework as well as an exemplary expert survey that can serve as a reference for software firm decision makers. The bottom-up part clarifies the influence of business processes on the business model based on a literature review, expert interviews, and inductive reasoning. The authors derive a classification framework that provides new insights into the maturity of current KPI-systems and their strategic importance with regards to business model changes.

The existing service discovery infrastructure with UDDI as the de facto standard, is limited in that it does not support more complex searching based on matching business processes. Two business processes match if they agree on their simple services, their processing order as well as any mandatory or optional requirements for the service. This matching semantics can be formalized by modelling business processes as annotated finite state automata (aFSAs) and deciding emptiness of the intersection aFSA. Computing the intersection of aFSAs and deciding emptiness are computationally expensive, being more than quadratic on the number of states and transitions, thus does not scale for large service repositories. This paper presents an approach for indexing and matching business processes modeled as aFSAs, for the purpose of service discovery. Evaluation of this approach shows a performance gain of several orders of magnitude over sequential matching and a linear complexity with regard to the data set size

This paper proposes a new approach for modeling business processes using the AI-Planning paradigm. Based on the concepts of agents, actions, constraints and goals, the AI-Planning approach allows explicit representation of various types of internal controls. Different threats to business processes, such as fraud, can be modeled as planning tasks—that is, finding a sequence of actions that intend to achieve a defined set of goals. Applying modeled threats to models of business processes, a planning reasoner can generate hypothetical scenarios of exposures. Because of its ability to explicitly represent threats, controls and exposures, we argue that the AI-Planning approach is useful for business process modeling from the control perspective. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Strategic-systems auditing (SSA) approaches require auditors to perform analyses of their clients at two levels (i.e., strategic and business-process levels) when conducting audits (e.g., Bell et al. 2002; Lemon et al. 2000). One advantage of using SSA approaches is that through these analyses, auditors gain a complex systems understanding of the client. This understanding enhances decision making in part by recognizing that small actions can have big effects that increase overall business risk (Jacobson 2001; Richmond 2000). This study examines how the two levels of analysis in SSA impact auditor judgments regarding small changes in a business process that can have big (risk-increasing) effects. Specifically, we predict that when strategic-positioning information (contained within the strategic-level analysis) indicates a client is typical of others in its industry, information at the business-process level regarding a small problem in a business process will be weighted less than when the strategic-positioning information indicates the client is atypical. Results support this contention. This behavior may have implications for the effectiveness of SSA approaches under certain conditions.