  An established trend in software engineering insists on using components
(sometimes also called services or packages) to encapsulate a set of related
functionalities or data. By defining interfaces specifying what functionalities
they provide or use, components can be combined with others to form more
complex components. In this way, IT systems can be designed by mostly re-using
existing components and developing new ones to provide new functionalities. In
this paper, we introduce a notion of component and a combination mechanism for
an important class of software artifacts, called security-sensitive workflows.
These are business processes in which execution constraints on the tasks are
complemented with authorization constraints (e.g., Separation of Duty) and
authorization policies (constraining which users can execute which tasks). We
show how well-known workflow execution patterns can be simulated by our
combination mechanism and how authorization constraints can also be imposed
across components. Then, we demonstrate the usefulness of our notion of
component by showing (i) the scalability of a technique for the synthesis of
run-time monitors for security-sensitive workflows and (ii) the design of a
plug-in for the re-use of workflows and related run-time monitors inside an
editor for security-sensitive workflows.
