Heuristic Authentication Protocol for Stateless Systems
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Solution Overview
Problem
Stateless protocol environments face performance degradation and increased bandwidth and computational overhead due to the need for every client request to be authenticated by a separate authentication server, leading to system latency and potential outages, while existing solutions like authentication tiers lack granularity and security.
Innovation Solution
A heuristic-based authentication protocol that calculates a trust level for requests using a trust function based on request metadata, allowing requests with a trust value exceeding a threshold to be authenticated locally at the resource server without forwarding to an authentication server, thereby reducing unnecessary authentication server interactions.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If every client request is authenticated by a separate authentication server in a stateless protocol environment, then security is maintained, but system performance degrades due to increased bandwidth consumption, computational overhead, and latency
Solution Approach 1:
The authentication process is segmented into two paths: a fast local authentication path for trusted requests and a full authentication server path for untrusted requests. The resource server divides authentication responsibilities by locally evaluating trust levels and only forwarding suspicious requests to the authentication server, thus segmenting the authentication workload and reducing server interactions.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary trust evaluation locally at the resource server before forwarding requests to the authentication server. By calculating a trust level based on request metadata and comparing it against a threshold, the system pre-filters requests, performing the authentication decision-making action in advance and avoiding unnecessary server communications for trusted requests.
2Reliability
If every client request is forwarded to an authentication server for authentication, then security is ensured, but network bandwidth is consumed and computational resources are wasted on requests that would be trusted
Solution Approach 1:
The resource server performs self-service authentication by locally calculating trust levels for incoming requests using request metadata and a trust function. Instead of relying entirely on the authentication server, the resource server serves itself by making local authentication decisions for trusted requests, thereby conserving network bandwidth and computational resources that would otherwise be wasted on unnecessary server interactions.
3Reliability
If a stateless protocol requires authentication for every request, then security is maintained, but system latency increases and potential outages occur due to authentication server dependency
Solution Approach 1:
The authentication process is segmented into two paths: a fast local authentication path for trusted requests and a full authentication server path for untrusted requests. The resource server divides authentication responsibilities by locally evaluating trust levels and only forwarding suspicious requests to the authentication server, thus segmenting the authentication workload and reducing server interactions.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary trust evaluation locally at the resource server before forwarding requests to the authentication server. By calculating a trust level based on request metadata and comparing it against a threshold, the system pre-filters requests, performing the authentication decision-making action in advance and avoiding unnecessary server communications for trusted requests.
Data Source
AI summary
Heuristic based approach to authentication of requests in a stateless protocol environment. Heuristics may be applied to a request to calculate a trust level for the request. The trust level for a request may at least in part be based on request parameters for the request and one or more previously received requests in a user context profile. Thus, historical request metadata may be used in calculating a trust value of a received request. If the trust value for a request exceeds a trust threshold, the request may be authenticated without forwarding the request to an authentication server. Thus, for requests in which the trust value exceeds the trust threshold, system performance may be improved by not requiring computational overhead and/or network bandwidth to be used in authentication. In this regard, the format of the request may still comport with the stateless protocol, but authentication may be made more efficient.