A Leverhulme Trust grant was awarded to Gregory Gutin (PI), Dave Cohen (CI) and Jason Crampton (CI) to work on analysing security-aware workflows.

The workflow satisfiability problem (WSP) arises in the context of security-aware workflow management systems (WMS). During past EPSRC-funded research, the PI and CIs discovered the widely applicable class of user-independent constraints and designed efficient (both in theory and practice) algorithms for that class of constraints. The access control community highly recognized their research by awarding Best Paper awards at SACMAT 2015 and 2016 (SACMAT is the leading conference in access control in information security).

The new grant intends to extend the scope of the past work, both to more complex workflow specifications and to generalizations of WSP that have applications to security in general computing systems, rather than just WMS's.

The research will be developed within our Research Centre for Algorithms and Applications.