Federated Role Provisioning for Cross-Enterprise RBAC Integration
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Existing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) systems face challenges in seamless integration and collaboration between disparate enterprises due to unique security systems, leading to costly and time-consuming development efforts for compatibility, hindering efficient and secure provisioning of system access in dynamic environments.
Innovation Solution
The implementation of federated role provisioning techniques, which generate and distribute metadata representing role hierarchies and constraints to dynamically resolve role assignments, enabling secure access management across remote environments through a federated role-defining service and dynamic role-binding service.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If traditional RBAC systems are used in each enterprise separately, then each enterprise maintains its own security control, but integration and collaboration between enterprises become costly and time-consuming
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a federated role provisioning service as an intermediary between enterprises with different RBAC systems. This service receives role requests from one enterprise, translates them into the target enterprise's RBAC model, and provisions roles automatically. The intermediary eliminates the need for direct compatibility work between disparate RBAC systems, reducing integration time and cost while maintaining security control through standardized role definitions and mappings.
2Ease of operation
If manual user access provisioning is used, then individual user permissions can be managed, but administrative feasibility becomes infeasible for organizations of moderate size
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a universal role provisioning service that handles multiple functions: receiving role requests in standardized format, translating roles across different RBAC models, provisioning roles in target systems, and managing role mappings. This single multi-functional service replaces numerous manual administrative tasks across different systems, making user access management feasible for organizations of any size while reducing administrative complexity through automation.
3Adaptability or versatility
If custom RBAC systems are developed for each enterprise, then each enterprise's specific security requirements are met, but compatibility work between enterprises becomes too costly and time-consuming
Solution Approach 1:
The patent employs parameter changes by transforming role definitions between different RBAC models through standardized parameters and attributes. The federated service maintains role metadata with configurable parameters that can be mapped to different enterprise-specific RBAC models. By changing the parameter representation of roles rather than the entire security model, the system adapts to different enterprise requirements while keeping integration costs low through automated translation rather than custom development.
Data Source
AI summary
In various embodiments, techniques for federated role provisioning are provided. A federated role definition for a resource is constructed and distributed. The federated role definition includes a role hierarchy having role assignments and constraints for dynamically resolving and binding a resource to particular ones of the role assignments. A resource may have role assignments statically bound to its identity and dynamically bound to its identity. Furthermore, some role assignments may be inherited from the role hierarchy.