Auditing Work ow Executions against Data ow Policies

This paper presents IFAudit , an approach for the audit of data ow policies in work ow models. IFAudit encompasses three steps. First, propagation graphs are generated from work ows' log data. They represent the explicit information ows caused, e.g., by data access and message-passing, that have occurred during the execution of the workow. Second, data ow policies expressing security and compliance requirements are formalized in a system-independent manner as a binary relation on the work ow principals. Third, an audit algorithm analyzes the propagation graphs against the policies and delivers evidence with regard to whether the work ow complies with them. Besides presenting the corresponding algorithms, the paper discusses possible extensions to address more general types of information ows.