PaaS Compliance Interception for Third-Party App Security
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Solution Overview
Problem
Organizations using platform-as-a-service platforms face challenges in maintaining control over security and compliance policies, as outsourcing computing platforms reduces their ability to apply custom security measures to third-party application packages.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a system that intercepts third-party application packages, extracts metadata, and applies compliance policies to determine whether to allow installation, using modules for identification, interception, extraction, and policy application to ensure compliance.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If organizations outsource computing platforms to platform-as-a-service providers, then cost and time savings are achieved, but control over security and compliance policies is reduced
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a compliance policy engine as an intermediary component between the platform-as-a-service provider and the organization's applications. This engine intercepts application deployment requests, evaluates them against organization-defined compliance policies, and enforces security controls without requiring direct platform modification, thus maintaining both deployment efficiency and security control
Solution Approach 2:
The compliance control system is segmented into independent modular components including policy definition modules, policy evaluation modules, and enforcement modules. This segmentation allows the organization to implement and customize security policies independently without affecting the underlying platform operations or requiring platform provider involvement
2Device complexity
If platform-as-a-service providers manage application installations, then platform maintenance is simplified, but ability to apply custom compliance policies is lost
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary compliance policy evaluation and enforcement actions before applications are deployed to the platform. By pre-assessing application packages against compliance policies and making authorization decisions in advance, the system ensures policy adherence without adding complexity to ongoing platform management operations
Solution Approach 2:
The compliance policy engine serves as an intermediary layer that sits between application developers and the platform-as-a-service infrastructure. It provides policy customization capabilities through configurable policy rules and evaluation criteria while maintaining simplified platform management by handling compliance enforcement transparently without requiring platform provider intervention
Data Source
AI summary
A computer-implemented method for protecting platform-as-a-service platforms may include 1) identifying a platform-as-a-service platform that is configured to allow installations of third-party application packages, 2) intercepting a third-party application package in transit to the platform-as-a-service platform for installation, 3) extracting metadata from the third-party application package, and 4) applying a compliance policy to the third-party application package to determine whether to allow an installation of the third-party application package on the platform-as-a-service platform based on the metadata. Various other methods, systems, and computer-readable media are also disclosed.