Unified Security Architecture for Virtual Organizations
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Current security systems for virtual organizations (VOs) fail to provide unified authentication and role-based access control for both resource and infrastructure services, often sacrificing local control or management, and do not adequately address the need for secure authentication and access control across distributed membership.
Innovation Solution
A comprehensive security architecture with identical or similar security mechanisms for each organization in the VO, incorporating a policy enforcement point (PEP) and policy decision point (PDP) to authenticate and authorize access to both resource and infrastructure services, ensuring only authorized parties can access VO services.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If a unified security mechanism is implemented across all VO services, then security management consistency is improved, but system complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The security mechanism is segmented into two distinct components: a Policy Enforcement Point (PEP) that intercepts and controls service calls, and a Policy Decision Point (PDP) that makes authorization decisions. This segmentation allows the security functionality to be distributed across multiple services while maintaining unified policy enforcement, thereby improving security consistency without proportionally increasing overall system complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The PEP acts as an intermediary component that sits between service callers and VO services. It intercepts service calls, enforces security policies, and coordinates with the PDP for authorization decisions. This intermediary approach centralizes security control logic while allowing individual services to maintain their operational independence, resolving the contradiction between unified security management and system complexity.
2Ease of operation
If security mechanisms are deployed at each organization, then local control is maintained, but management coordination becomes difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The security mechanism is designed as a universal framework that can be deployed at each organization while maintaining consistent policy enforcement across the entire VO. The PEP and PDP components can be instantiated locally at each organization, providing local control, while the standardized interface and policy framework enable coordinated security management across all participants in the virtual organization.
3Device complexity
If access control is based on VO membership, then simplicity is improved, but role-based security requirements are not met
Solution Approach 1:
The security mechanism implements local quality by making authorization decisions based on the specific role and context of each service call rather than applying uniform membership-based access control. The PDP evaluates policies locally for each intercepted service call, considering the caller's role, the target service, and the specific operation being requested. This enables fine-grained role-based security while maintaining the simplicity of the underlying membership structure.
Data Source
AI summary
A comprehensive security architecture for a virtual organization (VO) is disclosed. The comprehensive security architecture uses the same security mechanism or substantially similar security mechanisms to control access to VO infrastructure services as it uses to control access to resource services. Infrastructure services are services used to change the state of the VO and to change membership in the VO. Resource services (e.g. processing a purchase order) are services used in furtherance of achieving the objectives of the VO (e.g. build an aircraft). A security mechanism prevents a service call from accessing the service called until the security mechanism has decided to authorize or deny the service call. A security mechanism may decide to authorize or deny the service call based on details of the service call, a set of role-based access policies, and attributes from the caller's credentials including the caller's role in the VO.