Supporting secure business process design via security process patterns

Security is an important non-functional characteristic of the business processes used by organisations for the coordination of their activities. Nevertheless, the implementation of security at the operational level can be challenging due to the limited security expertise of process designers and the delayed consideration of security during process development. To overcome such issues, expert knowledge and proven security solutions can be captured in the form of process patterns, which can easily be reused and integrated to business processes with minimal security-related knowledge required. In this work we introduce process-level security patterns, each of which contains the main activities required for the operationalisation of different security requirements. The introduced patterns are then used as a component of an existing framework for the creation of secure business process designs, the application of which, is illustrated through a working example. A preliminary evaluation of the proposed patterns is conducted via a workshop session.