Detecting Inconsistent Security Policies in Computer Clusters
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Solution Overview
Problem
Maintaining consistent security policies across a computer cluster is complicated due to the potential for one security change to affect multiple components, leading to inconsistencies that can result in unintended or malicious access to private data.
Innovation Solution
A system that identifies and analyzes entity pairs within a computer cluster, determining directed relationships and security policies to detect inconsistent policies by comparing scopes of user access, and generates recommendations to rectify these inconsistencies, ensuring uniform security profiles across components.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If security policies are applied across multiple components in a cluster, then security coverage is improved, but policy consistency deteriorates due to complex interdependencies
Solution Approach 1:
The system continuously monitors and analyzes security policies across components, detecting inconsistencies and providing feedback to administrators. The configuration analyzer examines entity pairs and their security policies, identifying conflicts and reporting them for correction, creating a closed-loop feedback mechanism that maintains policy consistency.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an intermediary configuration analyzer that mediates between security policy definitions and their actual enforcement across components. This intermediary analyzes the impact of policy changes before deployment and identifies inconsistencies, acting as a buffer that prevents contradictory policies from being applied simultaneously.
2Reliability
If security policies are made more restrictive to prevent unauthorized access, then security is improved, but system accessibility deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies different security policy levels to different entities based on their specific requirements. Instead of uniform restrictive policies across all components, the configuration analyzer identifies entity pairs and applies appropriately scoped security restrictions, allowing more accessible policies where safe and stricter policies where needed.
Solution Approach 2:
The system dynamically adjusts security policy parameters based on analysis results. By examining entity relationships and interaction patterns, the configuration analyzer modifies policy restrictiveness parameters to achieve optimal balance between security and accessibility, rather than applying fixed restrictive rules.
3Adaptability or versatility
If manual management of security policies across multiple components is performed, then policy customization is improved, but management complexity deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The configuration analyzer performs automated analysis of security policies across components, identifying inconsistencies without requiring manual intervention. The system serves itself by automatically detecting and reporting policy conflicts, reducing the administrative burden while maintaining customized security configurations.
Solution Approach 2:
The configuration analyzer is a universal tool that works across multiple component types and security policy formats. It can analyze various entity pairs (components, datasets, users) and their relationships, providing a single multi-functional solution for managing security policy consistency across the entire cluster.
4Reliability
If security policy changes are propagated across the cluster, then security updates are improved, but risk of introducing inconsistencies deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The configuration analyzer performs preliminary analysis of security policy changes before they are propagated across the cluster. By examining entity pairs and predicting the impact of policy modifications in advance, the system identifies potential inconsistencies before deployment, preventing harmful propagation of contradictory policies.
Solution Approach 2:
The system takes preliminary anti-action by identifying and blocking inconsistent security policy changes before they can be applied. The configuration analyzer detects potential conflicts and prevents the propagation of policies that would create inconsistencies, countering the harmful effect before it occurs.
Data Source
AI summary
Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for identifying inconsistent security policies. One of the methods includes identifying running software components on a cluster of computers, a first subset of the components managing datasets, a second subset of the components managing other components; identifying entity pairs, each being either: (1) (i) a component paired with (ii) a dataset, or (2) two components paired with each other; determining, for each entity pair, a directed relationship from a first to a second entity, where the first entity is a component, and where the directed relationship represents the first entity executing a type of interaction with the second entity; identifying security policies affecting each entity that each limit user access to a type of interaction; and analyzing, for each entity, entity pairs including the entity and one or more security policies affecting the entity to identify inconsistent security policies.