Multi-tenant Auth Token Revocation Mechanism
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional multi-tenant storage systems lack effective mechanisms for authenticating and authorizing users across different tenants, leading to security and isolation issues, and face challenges with administrative scaling and access control management, especially in Software Defined Storage environments.
Innovation Solution
An authentication and authorization server generates an auth token with encrypted information about user roles and privileges across multiple tenants, allowing clients to determine access permissions and enabling secure access control, including revocation and reorganization of tenant access rights.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If a conventional multi-tenant system is deployed to serve multiple customers on a single storage system, then resource utilization and cost efficiency are improved, but security isolation and access control management deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the multi-tenant system into distinct authentication and authorization components. Each tenant is assigned unique authentication credentials and authorization policies, creating logical isolation layers that prevent cross-tenant access while sharing physical storage resources. The system divides access control into tenant-level and user-level permissions.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an intermediary authentication and authorization server that mediates all access requests between users and storage resources. This intermediary validates credentials, enforces authorization policies, and manages session tokens, preventing direct unauthorized access between tenants while enabling controlled resource sharing.
2Ease of operation
If a system administrator manages all authentication and authorization for multiple tenants, then centralized control is improved, but administrative scalability deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements local quality by enabling each tenant to have independent authentication and authorization configurations. Tenant administrators can manage their own users, roles, and permissions within their tenant context without requiring system administrator intervention. This localized control reduces the administrative burden on system administrators as the system scales.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent enables self-service capabilities where tenant administrators can autonomously manage their own authentication credentials, user accounts, and authorization policies. The system provides self-contained administrative functions for each tenant, reducing dependency on centralized system administrators and improving scalability.
3Ease of operation
If a user logs in to one customer and obtains multiple roles, then access convenience is improved, but cross-tenant security authorization deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements dynamic role activation based on the tenant context. When a user logs in, the system dynamically determines which tenant contexts the user should access and activates only the roles relevant to those contexts. This dynamic approach maintains access convenience while preventing unauthorized cross-tenant access by contextualizing role permissions.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent changes the parameter of role authorization from static to context-dependent. Authorization parameters are modified based on the current tenant context, user credentials, and predefined policies. The system dynamically adjusts which roles are active and what permissions they confer, ensuring that users can only exercise roles within authorized tenant boundaries.
Data Source
AI summary
A first request is received from a first user to revoke an access right of a second user of a first tenant for accessing data of a second tenant, where the first tenant is a parent tenant of the second tenant. In one embodiment, in response to the first request, a first role of the first user within the second tenant and a second role of the first user within the first tenant are determined. A first and second access privileges of the first role and second role of the first user, respectively, are determined to allow the first user to revoke the access right to the second tenant. In response to the first user having a revoke privilege in the first and second tenant, the first user is allowed to remove the second tenant from the first tenant.