Surrogate Key Access Control for Multitenant Content
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional collaboration services delegate access to and control of user-generated content to individual platforms or services, leading to risks of unintended disclosure or malicious access, compromising business intelligence and competitive advantage.
Innovation Solution
Implementing a gateway service acting as a reverse proxy, which routes requests for user-generated content to a third-party software service, receives surrogate keys, and directs them to a dedicated database system for secure storage and access control, ensuring only authorized parties can access the content.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If individual platforms or services manage access to user-generated content independently, then each service can operate autonomously with its own access control mechanisms, but security risks increase due to decentralized control and the need to separately monitor and audit multiple databases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a centralized access control system that acts as an intermediary between users and multiple collaborative services. This system receives access requests, validates them against centralized policies, and manages authentication across all services. The intermediary approach maintains service autonomy while centralizing security control, allowing each service to operate independently but with unified access management that reduces security risks and simplifies auditing.
2Reliability
If a centralized access control system is implemented to manage user-generated content across multiple services, then security and access control are improved through unified management, but system complexity increases due to the need to integrate and coordinate control across all services
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements a universal access control system that performs multiple functions: authentication, authorization, policy enforcement, and auditing across all collaborative services. This multi-functional system reduces overall complexity by consolidating what would otherwise require separate components for each service. The universal system manages user-generated content access centrally while maintaining compatibility with individual service operations, thereby improving reliability without proportionally increasing complexity.
Data Source
AI summary
A dedicated database system for storing user-generated content created when interacting with an environment defined by a software service. An access control system provides the software service with surrogate keys only and stores an association between surrogate keys and user-generated content in the dedicated database system. Upon receiving a request for user-generated content, the software service returns a surrogate key which can be translated into associated user-generated content by the dedicated database system.