Incremental Cloud Infrastructure Change Detection
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Cloud environments face challenges in efficiently analyzing and updating their security posture due to the complexity and scale of their infrastructure, leading to latency and inaccurate vulnerability identification.
Innovation Solution
A system and method for incremental change detection in cloud infrastructure, which involves detecting triggering criteria for update scans, invoking an incremental change detector, and updating the cloud infrastructure graph based on detected changes, thereby streamlining analysis and reducing latency.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If full cloud infrastructure scanning is performed regularly, then security vulnerability identification is comprehensive, but processing time and latency increase significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the cloud infrastructure scanning process into incremental change detection and full scanning components. The incremental change detector identifies only modified resources since the last scan, separating this from the complete infrastructure graph scanning. This segmentation allows the system to perform frequent, low-latency incremental scans while maintaining the option for periodic comprehensive scans, thus resolving the contradiction between comprehensive vulnerability identification and processing latency.
2Reliability
If comprehensive infrastructure scanning is performed, then all security vulnerabilities are identified, but computational resources and processing bandwidth are overwhelmed
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements partial action by using incremental change detection to scan only the portions of cloud infrastructure that have changed since the last scan, rather than performing excessive full infrastructure scanning. The incremental change detector identifies modified resources and triggers selective re-scanning of affected components, reducing computational resource consumption while maintaining security posture analysis reliability through targeted updates of the infrastructure graph.
3Loss of information
If frequent full scans are conducted, then infrastructure posture data remains up-to-date, but system performance and latency deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action through event monitoring that detects changes in cloud infrastructure resources in real-time. When changes are detected, the system preliminarily identifies affected resources and triggers incremental re-scanning only for those specific components. This preliminary detection mechanism ensures infrastructure posture data remains current without requiring frequent full scans, thereby maintaining data currency while preserving system processing efficiency.
Data Source
AI summary
The technology disclosed relates to analysis of security posture of a cloud environment that invokes an incremental change detector to perform an infrastructure scan of the cloud environment and return a scan result that identifies one or more changes to one or more infrastructure assets in the cloud environment. The scan result includes, for each particular change in the one or more changes, first information indicative of the particular change. A data scan is constrained to the one or more infrastructure assets having the one or more changes and second information associated with the one or more changes is obtained based on the data scan. A cloud infrastructure graph is updated based on one or more of the first information or the second information. The cloud infrastructure graph defines nodes that represent resources in the cloud environment and edges, between the nodes, that represent relationships between the resources.