Secure Enterprise Search Intermediary Architecture
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing search systems face challenges in securely accessing and indexing content across enterprise applications with dynamic security hierarchies, as they lack the ability to handle varying security attributes and user role mappings, leading to complications in authentication and authorization processes.
Innovation Solution
A flexible and extensible architecture that enables secure enterprise search by authenticating users through a flexible framework, submitting security attributes at query time, and using identity management systems to manage dynamic security access, allowing for real-time access to secure resources and providing suggested content and links relevant to user queries.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If traditional crawling and indexing methods are used to search enterprise content, then search coverage can be achieved, but security access control and user authentication become extremely complex and difficult to manage
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary component that sits between the search system and enterprise data sources. This intermediary handles authentication and authorization by obtaining security credentials, mapping user identities, and translating search queries into security-compliant access requests. This mediator absorbs the complexity of enterprise security hierarchies, allowing the search system to maintain broad coverage without directly managing complex security protocols.
Solution Approach 2:
The search system is segmented into distinct functional layers: a public-facing search interface, an intermediary authentication layer, and backend data source connectors. Each layer handles specific security concerns independently. The intermediary layer segments the complexity by separating credential management, user identity mapping, and security attribute translation into discrete manageable components rather than monolithic security logic.
2Reliability
If security credentials are validated for each data source during crawling, then secure access is ensured, but the crawling and indexing process becomes significantly slower
Solution Approach 1:
Security credentials and authentication tokens are obtained and cached in advance during the crawling phase. The intermediary component pre-authenticates with data sources and stores security context information that can be reused during indexing and query execution. This preliminary authentication action eliminates the need to repeatedly validate credentials for each individual document or index operation, thereby maintaining secure access while improving processing speed.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent implements continuous authentication sessions and cached security credentials that persist throughout the crawling and indexing process. Once authenticated, the security context is maintained and reused across multiple data source interactions, eliminating repeated authentication handshakes. This continuous useful action keeps the secure access channel open while maintaining high crawling throughput.
3Reliability
If dynamic security attributes are checked at query time for each user, then real-time authorization is achieved, but search performance deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The system transforms dynamic security attribute checks into optimized parameter-based filtering. User security attributes (roles, clearances, department assignments) are converted into searchable index parameters during querying. The intermediary component translates security requirements into efficient query parameters that can be processed by the search engine's existing optimization mechanisms, rather than requiring complex runtime security policy evaluations for each document.
Solution Approach 2:
Security attribute information is copied and embedded into the search index metadata during the indexing phase. Instead of retrieving and evaluating complex security policies at query time, the system creates simplified copies of security-relevant attributes (user roles, access levels) that are stored with the indexed documents. This allows rapid filtering based on pre-computed security parameters while maintaining real-time authorization accuracy.
Data Source
AI summary
A flexible and extensible architecture allows for secure searching across an enterprise. Such an architecture can provide a simple Internet-like search experience to users searching secure content inside (and outside) the enterprise. The architecture allows for the crawling and searching of a variety or of sources across an enterprise, regardless of whether any of these sources conform to a conventional user role model. The architecture further allows for security attributes to be submitted at query time, for example, in order to provide real-time secure access to enterprise resources. The user query also can be transformed to provide for dynamic querying that provides for a more current result list than can be obtained for static queries.