Role Reachability Analysis with Transitive Tags
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Solution Overview
Problem
In distributed systems, managing access control policies becomes complex due to the complexity of user roles, permissions, and transitive tag behavior, leading to potential unexpected privilege escalations.
Innovation Solution
An automated access control analyzer performs symbolic reasoning analysis using a role reachability graph to determine if a user or role can access another role through transitive tag states, identifying potential privilege escalations by analyzing key-value attributes and access control policies.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Measurement precision
If automated analysis tools are implemented to detect privilege escalations, then security detection capability is improved, but device complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an automated access control analyzer as an intermediary component that performs symbolic reasoning analysis on role reachability graphs. This analyzer acts as a mediator between the complex access control policies and the security monitoring system, automatically detecting potential privilege escalations without requiring direct complex interactions between all system components.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent replaces manual security analysis and monitoring mechanisms with an automated computational system. The access control analyzer uses symbolic reasoning algorithms to automatically traverse role reachability graphs and identify security issues, substituting human analysts and manual processes with an automated computational approach.
2Reliability
If manual management of access control policies is used, then ease of operation is maintained, but reliability decreases due to potential human error in detecting privilege escalations
Solution Approach 1:
The access control analyzer performs self-service by automatically analyzing role reachability and detecting potential privilege escalations without requiring manual intervention. The system autonomously traverses the role reachability graph, applies symbolic reasoning, and generates security findings, enabling the system to monitor and protect itself against configuration errors.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements a feedback mechanism where the automated analyzer continuously monitors access control configurations and provides security findings back to system administrators. This feedback loop enables automatic detection of privilege escalation paths and allows for corrective actions to be taken, improving overall system reliability.
Data Source
AI summary
Methods, systems, and computer-readable media for analysis of role reachability with transitive tags are disclosed. An access control analyzer determines a graph including nodes and edges. The nodes represent roles in a provider network hosting resources. The roles are associated with access control policies granting or denying access to individual resources. One or more of the access control policies grant or deny access based (at least in part) on key-value attributes. The access control analyzer determines, based (at least in part) on a role reachability analysis of the graph, whether a first role can assume a second role using role assumption steps for a particular state of the attributes. The attributes may include transitive attributes that persist during the role assumption steps.