Cross-Tenant Asset Access Using Policy Validation Tokens
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Solution Overview
Problem
Collaborative platforms often fail to facilitate cross-tenant collaboration between different teams within or outside an organization, lacking mechanisms for secure and policy-compliant access to shared resources.
Innovation Solution
A method and system enabling cross-tenant access by validating user permissions through a collaborative platform server that evaluates and generates tokens based on cross-tenant access policies, using substrate groups to manage membership and content access independently from organizational directories.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If cross-tenant access is enabled to facilitate collaboration between different teams and organizations, then collaboration efficiency and flexibility are improved, but security risks and access control complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediate validation system that acts as a mediator between tenants. The collaborative platform server validates access requests by checking cross-tenant access policies and generating validation tokens without requiring direct trust relationships between tenants. This intermediary validation mechanism enables secure cross-tenant collaboration while maintaining security boundaries.
2Reliability
If cross-tenant access policies are implemented to control resource sharing, then access security is improved, but system complexity and validation overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements preliminary action by pre-defining cross-tenant access policies that specify which tenants can access which resources under what conditions. These policies are established in advance, allowing the validation token generation process to simply check against predefined rules rather than making complex real-time access control decisions, thereby reducing operational complexity.
3Reliability
If validation tokens are generated for each access request to ensure policy compliance, then access security is improved, but processing time and computational overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent uses validation tokens as lightweight copies of access permissions. Instead of performing full policy validation for each access request, the system generates a validation token that encapsulates the necessary permission information. This token can be quickly verified without re-evaluating the complete access policy, significantly reducing processing time while maintaining security.
Data Source
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AI summary
Systems and methods for enabling cross-tenant access are provided. In particular, a computing device may receive an access request, from a user of a first tenant, requesting access to a resource of a plurality of resources on a shared collaborative channel of a second tenant. The computing device may further evaluate cross-tenant access policies of the first and second tenants to determine that access to the plurality of resources is authorized by the first and second tenants, validate that the user is a member of the shared collaborative channel, and generate a validation token indicating the user is validated to access the plurality of resources. Based on the validation token, the computing device may further validate that the user is in compliance with the cross-tenant access policies for accessing the resource and grant the user a set of permissions to access the resource.