Petri net-based methods for analyzing structural security in e-commerce business processes

Abstract

The rapid development of e-commerce worldwide, means more e-commerce business processes adopting the structure of multiple participants; these include shopper clients, merchant and third-party payment platforms (TPPs), banks, and so on. It is a distributed and complex system, where communications among these participants rely on the web services and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) such as Cashier-as-a-Service or CaaS. This introduces new security challenges due to complex interactions among multiple participants, and any design flaws in procedure structures may result in serious security issues. We study the structural security issues based on Petri nets, and a framework for analyzing structural security in e-commerce business process is proposed. Petri net-based modeling and analysis methods are also provided. Given the specifications of e-commerce business processes, the proposed methods can help designers analyze structural security issues of an e-commerce business process.