Dynamic Regeneration of Workflow Specification with Access Control Requirements in MANET

Distributed software systems are the basis for innovative applications. The key for achieving survivable and maintainable distributed systems is agility because the nondeterministic nature of distribution would otherwise leave the system uncontrollable, especially in emerging mobile ad-hoc networks. A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is based on a self-organizing and rapidly deployed network of mobile services to collaborate without using any pre-existing fixed network infrastructure. Survivability is defined as the capability of a service to fulfill its mission in a timely manner, even in the presence of attacks, failures, or accidents. There are four key survivability properties: resistance, recognition, recovery and adaptation. Recovery, a hallmark of survivability, is the capability to maintain critical components and resource during attack, limit the extent of damage, and restore full services following attack. Exception handling is a way to deals with the recovery aspect of survivability. Resistance can be viewed as the process of limiting access to critical and vulnerable resources only to authorized users, programs, processes, or other systems. This paper bridges the analysis of secure business process and its recovery aspect in terms of exception handling in the context of access control requirements. We propose an integrated approach to engineer a survivable distributed system through dynamic regeneration of workflow specifications in the context of Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) and eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML).