Contextual Access Control for Property Graph Data Traversal
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Solution Overview
Problem
The challenge of handling Big Data is compounded by privacy, legal, and security concerns that lead to the creation of 'data silos', where sensitive and less sensitive data are over-protected and under-analyzed, hindering data mining and traversal across silos, resulting in lost potential use cases.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of contextual security access techniques using an actor model with message passing for controlled access to information, allowing granular access control based on user identity, data ownership, and traversal paths, which can be applied to graph operations, SQL processing, and other data processing methods.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If data silos are created to protect sensitive information, then security and privacy are improved, but data mining and traversal across silos are hindered
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary access control system that mediates between data silos and query requests. This system uses contextual information about the query path and user permissions to dynamically control access, allowing data mining across silos while maintaining security boundaries. The intermediary evaluates contextual security conditions and permits or blocks traversal based on accumulated query context.
Solution Approach 2:
The access control mechanism is dynamic rather than static. Security permissions are not fixed but change based on the accumulated contextual information from the query path. As a query traverses through different data silos, the access control system dynamically adjusts permissions based on the accumulated context, user identity, and sensitivity levels of encountered data.
2Productivity
If contextual security access control is implemented, then secure data access across silos is enabled, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The access control system is segmented into modular components: contextual information collectors at each data silo, path accumulation mechanisms, and policy evaluation modules. Each component performs a specific function - collecting contextual data, accumulating query path information, or evaluating security policies - which reduces overall system complexity through functional decomposition.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-defining security policies and permission structures for different data silos. Instead of making complex real-time decisions about every access request, the system pre-establishes security rules that are then evaluated against accumulated contextual information, simplifying the real-time access control process.
Data Source
AI summary
A computing device and method for contextual access, including the computing device to implement a traversal of a property graph of data. The traversal includes using contextual information to determine whether to grant access to vertices of the property graph and to outgoing edges of the vertices.