Identity Manager Privilege Optimization
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Solution Overview
Problem
Business-critical information is at risk due to unused or seldom-used access privileges within information handling systems, often resulting from employees accumulating permissions that are no longer necessary as their roles change, leading to potential security threats and inefficiencies.
Innovation Solution
An identity manager correlates group membership data with access map data to create a user-resource access map, analyzing user activity logs to identify unused privileges and automatically modifying user accounts to remove or adjust these privileges based on usage thresholds, thereby ensuring only active permissions are maintained.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If users are granted broad access privileges to ensure they can perform all possible tasks, then adaptability and versatility are improved, but security risks and system complexity increase due to accumulated unused permissions
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary analysis of user activity patterns before making privilege modification decisions. By monitoring and analyzing historical access logs and user behavior patterns in advance, the system identifies unused privileges and prepares modification recommendations, preventing security risks before they materialize while maintaining necessary access during the analysis period
Solution Approach 2:
The system establishes a continuous feedback loop where user access patterns are monitored, analyzed, and used to dynamically adjust privileges. The identity manager receives feedback from access logs and activity monitoring, processes this information to identify unused permissions, and automatically modifies user accounts accordingly, creating a closed-loop system that continuously optimizes security while maintaining adaptability
2Reliability
If manual review and management of user privileges is performed, then security control is improved, but time consumption and operational complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system enables self-service automated privilege management where the identity manager autonomously monitors user activity, identifies unused privileges, and modifies user accounts without requiring manual intervention. The system serves itself by automatically generating and executing privilege optimization decisions based on analyzed access patterns, eliminating the time-consuming manual review process while maintaining reliable security control
Solution Approach 2:
The patent replaces the mechanical manual process of privilege review with an automated electronic system. The identity manager uses computer-based algorithms to analyze access logs, correlate user behavior patterns, and automatically modify permissions, substituting human manual operations with automated computational processes that are both faster and more reliable
3Productivity
If automated systems monitor and analyze user activity logs to identify unused privileges, then productivity is improved by reducing manual intervention, but device complexity and processing requirements increase
Solution Approach 1:
The identity manager is designed as a universal system that performs multiple functions: it monitors user activity, analyzes access patterns, identifies unused privileges, and automatically modifies user accounts. By consolidating these diverse functions into a single multi-functional platform, the system achieves high productivity in privilege management while avoiding the complexity that would result from multiple separate specialized systems
Data Source
AI summary
Systems and techniques to identify and modify unused (or seldom used) access privileges are described. Group membership data may be correlated with access map data to create a user-resource access map identifying privilege levels associated with individual user accounts to access computing resources in a computing system. User activity event logs generated as a result of user accounts accessing the resources may be correlated with the user-resource access map to identify user accounts that do not use (or seldom use) particular privilege levels to access particular resources. The identified user accounts may be modified to remove the unused (or seldom used) privileges levels.