Detecting Conflicts Between Data-Minimization and Security Requirements in Business Process Models

Abstract

Detecting conflicts between security and data-minimization requirements is a challenging task. Since such conflicts arise in the specific context of how the technical and organizational components of the target system interact with each other, their detection requires a thorough understanding of the underlying business processes. For example, a process may require anonymous execution for a task that writes data to a secure data storage, where the identity of the writer is needed for the purpose of accountability. To address this challenge, we propose an extension of the BPMN 2.0 business process modeling language to enable: (i) the specification of process-oriented data-minimization and security requirements, (ii) the detection of conflicts between these requirements based on a catalog of domain-independent anti-patterns. The considered security requirements were reused from SecBPMN2, a security-oriented extension of BPMN 2.0, while the data-minimization part is new. SecBPMN2 also provides a graphical query language called SecBPMN2-Q, which we extended to formulate our anti-patterns. We report on feasibility and usability of our approach based on a case study featuring a healthcare management system, and an experimental user study.