Post-hoc Access Control Checks for Compliance Audits
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Solution Overview
Problem
Complex and frequently changing security and compliance policies in enterprise systems lead to unintentional policy violations, requiring extensive manual audits to distinguish between incidents caused by policy changes and actual violations, resulting in high costs and inefficiencies.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a computer-implemented method for post-hoc access control checks that analyze access control requests based on historical security state versions, allowing for automated compliance audits and filtering of non-critical access failures, using a security state versioning system and audit knowledge base to provide post-hoc access control decisions.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If security policies are changed frequently to maintain compliance, then compliance accuracy is improved, but unintentional policy violations increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs post-hoc access control checks by retrieving historical security state versions and replaying access control requests with those historical states. This preliminary action allows the system to proactively identify and filter unintentional policy violations before they are reported as incidents, thereby maintaining compliance accuracy while reducing false positives from frequent policy changes.
2Measurement precision
If manual audits are performed to distinguish policy violation incidents, then detection precision is improved, but loss of time and productivity decrease
Solution Approach 1:
The system creates copies of historical security state versions and replays access control requests against these copies to perform automated post-hoc checks. This copying approach enables automated analysis of access control decisions without requiring manual auditor intervention, thereby maintaining high detection precision while dramatically reducing the time and productivity loss associated with manual audits.
3Measurement precision
If extensive manual audits are conducted to filter unintentional violations, then measurement precision is improved, but device complexity and cost increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs self-service by automatically retrieving historical security state versions, replaying access control requests, and evaluating outcomes without human intervention. The automated post-hoc check system independently identifies and filters unintentional policy violations, reducing the need for complex manual audit processes and associated costs while maintaining high detection accuracy.
4Productivity
If post-hoc access control checks are implemented, then productivity is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system segments the compliance audit process into distinct components: historical security state version storage, access control request retrieval, replay evaluation, and result filtering. This segmentation allows the complex post-hoc check functionality to be implemented as modular additions to existing access control systems, improving productivity while managing device complexity through structured, incremental integration.
Data Source
AI summary
Methods, systems, and computer-readable storage media for post-hoc analysis of access control decisions, where actions include receiving a request to analyze an access control request, for which an access control decision has been provided based on a policy, retrieving information associated with the access control request from a log, the information including a first security state version and a time, determining a time interval based on the time and an audit policy, retrieving information associated with at least a second security state version based on the time interval, and evaluating the access control request based on information of the first security state and information of the second security state to provide a post-hoc access control decision.