Reducing the Incidence of Unintended, Human-Caused Information Flows in Enterprise Systems

Research in enterprise system security has largely focused on the development of theoretical models capable of demonstrating mathematically that they possess desired security properties. However, recent results confirm that many of these models cannot be applied in practice because of the unpredictability of human participants' behavior in business processes. Moreover, while malicious attacks remain a significant problem, the majority of user-caused information leaks in Enterprise Systems are unintentional (or have many unintentional components) and could potentially be prohibited if explicitly recognized and appropriately modeled. In this paper we argue that approaches for achieving information flow security in enterprises need to combine process and policy understandability with usability of the enforcement mechanisms. We present a modeling approach that allows security policies to be formulated in such a way that (1) they are aligned to the business processes executed in an enterprise, (2) are understandable by all relevant stakeholders, and (3) can be semi-automatically transformed into run-time enforcement mechanisms.