Ephemeral Directive Migration Across Heterogeneous CNAPPs
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Solution Overview
Problem
Organizations face challenges in managing and enforcing policies across diverse and evolving cloud infrastructure due to siloed environments and proprietary configurations of cloud-native application protection platforms (CNAPPs), leading to labor-intensive, error-prone manual processes that are incapable of scaling to meet complex demands.
Innovation Solution
A directive management system that normalizes policy directives into a common intermediate representation (CIR) format, enabling cross-platform compatibility and automated translation, validation, and enforcement, utilizing a platform capabilities database and machine learning for adaptive compliance management.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If manual policy management processes are used, then flexibility in handling proprietary configurations is maintained, but labor intensity and error rates increase while scalability deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a policy translation service as an intermediary component that converts policies from proprietary CNAPP configurations into a standardized intermediate representation format. This mediator enables automated processing and migration across different platforms without requiring manual intervention for each proprietary format, thus improving scalability while maintaining adaptability to various vendor-specific configurations.
2Productivity
If automated policy migration is implemented, then productivity and scalability improve, but system complexity increases due to need for translation and validation mechanisms
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts the complex translation and validation logic into a separate, dedicated policy translation service component. By isolating this complexity into a standalone service with a well-defined interface, the main system benefits from automated migration capabilities without bearing the full burden of implementation complexity. The extracted service handles vendor-specific format variations independently.
Solution Approach 2:
The standardized intermediate representation format acts as an intermediary layer that simplifies the translation process. Rather than implementing direct complex mappings between all possible vendor formats, the system uses this intermediate format as a neutral ground, reducing overall system complexity while enabling automated migration.
3Adaptability or versatility
If policies are migrated across heterogeneous CNAPPs, then adaptability to diverse platforms improves, but ensuring consistency and compliance becomes more difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates a universal standardized intermediate representation format that can represent policies across multiple vendor-specific CNAPP platforms. This universal format ensures that policies maintain their meaning and enforcement logic regardless of the target platform, thereby ensuring consistency and compliance while enabling migration to diverse platforms. The standardized format serves as a common language that preserves policy intent across heterogeneous systems.
Data Source
AI summary
A directive management system may receive a source directive from a source cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). The source directive defines an ephemeral condition in applying the source directive. The system may create a common intermediate representation (CIR) that includes the ephemeral condition normalized as a parameter in the CIR. The system may translate the CIR into a default machine-executable directive that is executable by a target CNAPP. The system may receive an event trigger that matches the ephemeral condition stored in the CIR. The system may create, responsive to receiving the event trigger that matches the ephemeral condition, an ephemeral machine-executable directive from the CIR. The ephemeral machine-executable directive is used to supersede the default machine-executable directive at least temporarily. The system may transmit the ephemeral machine-executable directive to the target CNAPP.