Centralized Authentication Authority for Decentralized Service Access
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current authentication and authorization systems for computing services are decentralized, requiring each service to manage its own access logic and policies, leading to inefficiencies and complexities in managing access across multiple services and entities.
Innovation Solution
A centralized authentication and authorization system, where a central authority manages access policies and provides temporary credentials for multiple services, leveraging a certification authority to secure certificate generation and validation, allowing for streamlined authentication and authorization across various computing processes and entities.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If each service implements its own authentication and authorization mechanisms, then each service can independently control access policies, but the system complexity increases and management becomes difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a central authority as an intermediary between clients and services. This central authority issues credentials and manages authentication, while services only need to verify credentials. This mediator approach allows services to maintain independent access control through credential verification while offloading the complex authentication management to the central authority, thus resolving the contradiction between independent policy control and system complexity.
2Adaptability or versatility
If each service manages its own authentication logic, then services can have customized access policies, but the difficulty of managing access across multiple services increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates a universal credential system where a single credential issued by the central authority can be used across multiple services. Services share a common verification mechanism through the central authority, allowing customized access policies to be enforced universally. This multi-functional approach enables different services to have customized policies while using a unified authentication management system, reducing the difficulty of managing access across multiple services.
3Ease of operation
If centralized authentication is implemented, then access management becomes simpler, but the system requires a trusted central authority which adds a single point of failure
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the authentication system into distinct functional components: credential issuance by the central authority, credential verification by services, and credential validation through cryptographic signatures. This segmentation distributes trust and functionality across multiple independent components. The central authority is no longer a single point of failure but one component in a distributed system where services can independently verify credentials, thus maintaining simplicity while improving reliability.
Data Source
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AI summary
At least one processor of a central authority separate from a computing process may establish a first trust relationship between the computing process and a central authority separate from the computing process. The establishing may include authenticating the computing process, which may include providing a signed token to the computing process, receiving a request for the certificate from the computing process including the signed token and policy ID data, determining that the computing process is eligible for the certificate according to a policy that associates the certificate with the policy ID data, and validating the signed token. In response to the establishing, the at least one processor may obtain the certificate. The certificate may be signed by a third party certificate authority with which the central authority has a second trust relationship separate from the first trust relationship. The at least one processor may provide the certificate to the computing process.