Service-to-service digital path tracing for message authenticity
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Solution Overview
Problem
In service-to-service interactions, existing authentication methods fail to verify the complete path of a digital message, leaving services vulnerable to security anomalies as they cannot validate the message's path beyond the recipient service.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a trace mechanism that concatenates digital signatures from each service along the message path, allowing the recipient service to verify the path using digital certificates, either included in the message or obtained from a certificate service, to detect and address security anomalies.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If digital signatures are used for service-to-service authentication, then message authenticity is verified, but the complete message path cannot be validated
Solution Approach 1:
The path validation mechanism is segmented into discrete digital signatures attached at each service hop. Each service along the message path generates a digital signature that can be independently verified, allowing the recipient to validate each segment of the path separately while maintaining overall path integrity.
Solution Approach 2:
The digital signatures are nested within the message structure, with each service's signature embedded in the message flow. The signatures are organized in a hierarchical manner where inner signatures are contained within outer ones, allowing the recipient to peel back layers and verify each service's authentication step by step.
2Reliability
If digital certificates are included in every message, then path validation is enabled, but message size increases
Solution Approach 1:
The full digital certificate is extracted and stored externally in a certificate store, while only the essential signature information is included in the message. This allows the recipient to access the complete certificate when needed without burdening the message transmission with unnecessary data, thus reducing message size while maintaining validation capability.
Solution Approach 2:
A certificate store acts as an intermediary between the message and the full digital certificate. The certificate store stores the complete certificates and provides them to services only when path validation is required, eliminating the need to include entire certificates in every message while still enabling comprehensive path validation.
3Reliability
If all services along the path validate messages, then path security is enhanced, but processing time increases
Solution Approach 1:
Services along the path perform preliminary actions by pre-computing and attaching their digital signatures to messages as they pass through. This advance preparation allows the final recipient to validate the entire path efficiently without requiring real-time computation at each intermediate service, thus reducing overall processing time while maintaining security.
Solution Approach 2:
Each service along the path autonomously generates and attaches its own digital signature without requiring coordination or additional processing from other services. This self-service approach distributes the validation workload independently across services, avoiding bottlenecks and reducing total processing time while ensuring path security.
Data Source
AI summary
A service receives from a sender service a digital message and a corresponding trace, which includes an ordered set of digital signatures of one or more services that participated in causing the service to receive the digital message. The trace may further specify an ordering of the one or more services, which may be generated according to the order of participation of these one or more services. The service may compare the received trace to recorded message paths to determine whether the ordering specified within the trace is valid. If the ordering is valid, the service may use one or more digital certificates to further verify the digital signatures included within the trace. If the service determines that these digital signatures are also valid, the service may process the message.