Analyzing Workflows in Business Processes for Obstructions due to Authorization Policies

It is well-known that aligning security policies with business objectives is a difficult task. To address this, we present a new approach to analyze work-flow instances for obstructions due to static and dynamic authorization policies. We give a new algorithm that allows organizations to properly assign users to tasks without the policies causing obstructions (e.g. deadlocks). Our work is novel since we consider loops, conditions and parallelism in workflows, through a new concept called "release" events. We illustrate our approach on some real-world workflows in healthcare and financial industries.