Comparative Study of Service-Based Security-Aware Business Processes Automation Tools

The use of business processes to model and design business activities is becoming a reality to a significant number of companies. Meanwhile, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is being a widely adopted strategy for business processes execution, which often demands communication between different (and remote) services. This fact leads to the need of incorporating security elements into business processes, because sensitive data can be targeted in the communication process. Existing tools currently focus both on the functional automation by translating high-level business processes in executable artifacts and/or on the security automation by translating security requirements into executable security configurations. In this work, we present a comparative study that evaluates these tools using relevant metrics. A solution named BPA-Sec Analyzer was also developed to automatically generate relevant statistics information related to the produced artifacts. An illustrative scenario is introduced to support the comparison/evaluation.