Secure Tenant Chaos Experiments via Certificate-Based Access Control
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current chaos engineering solutions fail to provide tenants with control over the scope of execution of chaos experiments in multitenancy environments, making it difficult to ensure secure and targeted testing of cloud infrastructure and applications.
Innovation Solution
Implementing secure tenant-based chaos experiments using certificates, where a computer system receives a scope of execution indication from a tenant, identifies a public key from a certificate chain, and transmits it to encrypt and execute chaos experiments within specific computing resources, ensuring only authorized tenants can execute experiments.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Adaptability or versatility
If chaos experiments are executed in multitenancy environments without certificate-based access control, then experiment execution flexibility is improved, but security and authorization control deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces certificates as an intermediary mechanism between tenants and chaos experiment execution. Certificates serve as the mediator that verifies tenant identity and authorization level, enabling secure access control without restricting legitimate experiment execution. The certificate verification process acts as the intermediary step that both protects security and maintains execution flexibility for authorized users.
2Reliability
If certificate verification is implemented for chaos experiment execution, then security and authorization control are improved, but system complexity and overhead increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements certificate verification in advance before chaos experiment execution is permitted. By performing the certificate check preliminarily and storing verification results, the system avoids repeated verification overhead during experiment execution. This preliminary action approach reduces real-time system complexity while maintaining strong security controls.
3Reliability
If tenants are given control over scope of execution, then security and targeted testing are improved, but system complexity and access control mechanisms increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies local quality by associating specific certificates with specific tenants and their authorized scope of execution. Each tenant receives certificates tailored to their specific authorization level and target resources, rather than using a universal access mechanism. This localized certificate assignment enables precise control over which tenants can execute experiments on which resources, reducing the complexity of managing broad access control lists.
Data Source
AI summary
Techniques for implementing secure tenant-based chaos experiments using certificates are disclosed. In some embodiments, a computer system may receive an indication of a scope of execution for a chaos experiment from a tenant of a multitenancy environment, identify a public key from a certificate chain based on the received indication of the scope of execution, and transmit the identified public key to the tenant. Next, the computer system may then receive an encrypted version of the chaos experiment from the tenant, where the encrypted version of the chaos experiment has been encrypted with the identified public key, and then transmit the encrypted version of the chaos experiment to one or more software agents.