Vulnerability Analysis in SOA-Based Business Processes

Business processes and services can more flexibly be combined when based upon standards. However, such flexible compositions practically always contain vulnerabilities, which imperil the security and dependability of processes. Vulnerability management tools require patterns to find or monitor vulnerabilities. Such patterns have to be derived from vulnerability types. Existing analysis methods such as attack trees and FMEA result in such types, yet require much experience and provide little guidance during the analysis. Our main contribution is ATLIST, a new vulnerability analysis method with improved transferability. Especially in service-oriented architectures, which employ a mix of established web technologies and SOA-specific standards, previously observed vulnerability types and variations thereof can be found. Therefore, we focus on the detection of known vulnerability types by leveraging previous vulnerability research. A further contribution in this respect is the, to the best of our knowledge, most comprehensive compilation of vulnerability information sources to date. We present the method to search for vulnerability types in SOA-based business processes and services. Also, we show how patterns can be derived from these types, so that tools can be employed. An additional contribution is a case study, in which we apply the new method to an SOA-based business process scenario.