System and method for maintaining security in a distributed computer network

This application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/721,557, filed Nov. 22, 2000, entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR MAINTAINING SECURITY IN A DISTRIBUTED COMPUTER NETWORK, which is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/248,788, filed Feb. 21, 1999, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,158,010, issued Dec. 5, 2000, entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR MAINTAINING SECURITY IN A DISTRIBUTED COMPUTER NETWORK which claims the benefit of priority to U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60/105,963, filed Oct. 28, 1998, entitled SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR MAINTAINING SECURITY IN A DISTRIBUTED COMPUTER NETWORK, each of which applications are herein incorporated by reference.

A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the Patent and Trademark Office patent file or records, but otherwise reserves all copyright rights whatsoever.

1. Field of the Invention

This invention relates generally to computer security systems, and relates more particularly to a system and method for managing and enforcing complex security requirements in a distributed computer network.

2. Description of the Background Art

Computer security issues have become more complex with the continual evolution of contemporary computer systems. As corporations utilize increasingly distributed and open computing environments, the security requirements of an enterprise typically grow accordingly. The complexity of employee, customer and partner access to critical information assets, while assuring proper security, has proven to be a major hurdle. For example, many organizations deploy applications that allow their external business partners, as well as their own internal employees, to access sensitive information resources within the enterprise. In the absence of adequate security measures, an enterprise may thus be subject to the risk of decreased security and confidentiality.

While most organizations focus their security concerns on protecting the internal network from the outside world, it is estimated that 80-90% of all corporate security breaches come from within an organization (source: Aberdeen Group, September 1997). This further underscores the need to specify and enforce an access control security policy within the enterprise network.

In today\'s complex business environment, specifying, stating, implementing and managing an enterprise access control policy may be both difficult and inefficient. When corporate data and applications revolved around a mainframe model, the problem of defining and managing access to corporate applications was relatively straightforward. Today, the complexity of business methods, as well as the complexity of distributed application architectures, may force companies to resort to manual, ineffective or highly custom approaches to access control in their attempts to implement the business process.

To secure a complex and distributed computer system, the system may typically employ a combination of encryption, authentication, and authorization technologies. Encryption is a means of sending information between participants in a manner that prevents other parties from reading the information. Authentication is a process of verifying a party\'s identity. Authorization is a technique for determining what actions a participant is allowed to perform.

Encryption and authentication are well-understood and have led to effective network security products, whereas authorization technology is not as well developed, and is often inadequate for many enterprises. The security approach of most companies today is to focus on the authentication of users to ensure that those users are part of the organization or a member of a select group. Authentication can be accomplished with a number of different approaches, from simple password or challenge response mechanisms to smart cards and biometric devices such as a fingerprint reader. Once users are authenticated, however, there is still a significant problem in managing and enforcing their set of privileges, which may be unique and vary widely between users. The same authentication mechanism can be used for every user, but different authorization mechanisms must be developed for most applications. Therefore, reliable and efficient access control is a much more difficult problem facing enterprises today.

Authentication mechanisms often work together with some sort of access control facility that can protect information resources from unauthorized users. Examples of network security products include firewalls, digital certificates, virtual private networks, and single sign-on systems. Some of these products provide limited support for resource-level authorization. For example, a firewall can screen access requests to an application or a database, but does not provide object-level authorization within an application or database. Single Sign-On (SSO) products, for example, maintain a list of resources an authenticated user can access by managing the login process to many different applications. However, firewalls, SSO and other related products are very limited in their ability to implement a sophisticated security policy characteristic of many of today\'s enterprises. They are limited to attempting to manage access at a login, or “launch level”, which is an all or nothing approach that inherently cannot implement a business-level policy.

A real-world security policy within a large enterprise is a detailed and dynamic knowledge base specific to that organization. The authorization privileges are specific to the constantly evolving set of users, applications, partners, and global policies that the enterprise puts in place to protect its key information resources. A security policy within a large enterprise can consist of tens or hundreds of thousands of individual rules that cover which users are authorized to access particular applications, perform various operations, or manage the delegation and transfer of tasks. Many of these policy rules that implement the business practice of the organization have to be hard coded within custom-built applications or stored in the database.

The key problem is that these policy rules are localized, scattered throughout the organization, and embedded in applications and databases. Such embedding is expensive and error-prone, and mitigates against efficient policy updates. An organization cannot effectively implement and manage the resulting policy. Inconsistencies arise and updates can quickly become unmanageable. Policy queries and analysis from a global perspective are nearly impossible. The resulting policy begins to diverge from the intended business practices of the organization. Compromises are made in the policy implementation at the department level, and auditors can quickly become frustrated.

The increasing security risks associated with the proliferation of distributed computing, including Intranet and Extranet applications, are prompting many organizations to explore a broad range of security solutions for controlling access to their important information assets. Although organizations have a number of solutions to choose from for authenticating users (determining and verifying who is attempting to gain access to the network or individual applications), there is little choice when it comes to controlling what users can do and when they can do it to the extent necessary to implement the kinds of complex security policies required by modern organizations. Organizations have been forced to choose between custom authorization solutions that are costly, error-prone, and difficult to manage, or third-party solutions that are very limited in their ability to control access to information across applications and databases.

A real-world security policy within a large organization is a detailed and dynamic knowledge base that determines which users are authorized to access particular applications, perform various operations or manage the delegation and transfer of tasks, as well as when and under what circumstances they are permitted to do so. Authorization privileges depend upon a constantly evolving set of users, applications, partners, and business polices that comprise the enterprise security policy. A typical enterprise environment consists of several thousand users, hundreds of applications, and a myriad of network resources, resulting in a security policy that can consist of tens or hundreds of thousands of interrelated policy rules.

Typically, organizations attempt to control access to the internals of in-house applications through policy rules that are hard-coded in the application or through stored procedure statements in the database. But as the number of applications and databases grows, this patchwork approach to authorization quickly gets out of hand. First, organizations must incur the costly and time-consuming overhead of developing customized security code for each application. But more importantly, once the code is developed and embedded in an application, the embedded policy rules become impossible to track, difficult to update, and nearly impossible to manage because they are scattered throughout the organization.

With an estimated 80 percent of all security breaches coming from authorized users (source: Forrester Research), advanced policy features and enforcement mechanisms are needed to control access to sensitive information assets. To implement an enterprise policy, organizations need a centralized policy and a powerful way to specify policy rules to give them adequate access control security. At the same time, they need a distributed authorization infrastructure to provide authorization services to all applications with performance and scalability for modern distributed network environments.

Therefore, for the foregoing reasons, an improved system and method are needed to protect the distributed networks of enterprises against unauthorized access to their valuable information assets by managing and enforcing the complex security policy requirements of the organization.