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Solving the Workflow Satisfiability Problem Using General Purpose Solvers

delete2023-11-01
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OA
AI
D
Daniel Karapetyan *
G
Gregory Gutin
DOI:10.1109/TDSC.2022.3227241delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
The workflow satisfiability problem (WSP) is a well-studied problem in access control seeking allocation of authorised users to every step of the workflow, subject to workflow specification constraints. It was noticed that the number kof steps is typically small compared to the number of users in the real-world instances of WSP; therefore k is considered as the parameter in WSP parametrised complexity research. While WSP in general was shown to be W[1]-hard, WSP restricted to a special case of user-independent (UI) constraints is fixed-parameter tractable (FPT). However, restriction to the UI constraints might be impractical. To efficiently handle non-UI constraints, we introduce the notion of branching factor of a constraint. As long as the branching factors of the constraints are relatively small and the number of non-UI constraints is reasonable, WSP can be solved in FPT time. Extending the results from Karapetyan et al. (2019), we demonstrate that general-purpose solvers are capable of achieving FPT-like performance on WSP with arbitrary constraints when used with appropriate formulations. This enables one to tackle most of practical WSP instances. While important on its own, we hope that this result will also motivate researchers to look for FPT-aware formulations of other FPT problems.
Keywords:
Authorization
Complexity theory
Software
Business
Absorption
Software algorithms
Computer science
Authorisations
constraints
fixed parameter tractability
workflow satisfiability problem

Journal

IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing cover
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
IF:
7.5
Papers:
2.4K
Citations:
9.6K

Organization

U
University of Nottingham
Scholars:
3.4W
Papers: 3.2W
Citations: 5.5W
U
university of london
Scholars:
21.5W
Papers: 19.7W
Citations: 305