Hewlett-packard Development Company, L.P.

Arcsight Inc

Ankur Lahoti

Kenny Tidwell

Chad Ward

Christian Friedrich Beedgen

Hui Huang

A unique identifier is assigned to a network node and is used to obtain an 'asset model' corresponding to the node and to determine whether the node is a member of a particular category. An asset model is a set of information about a node (e.g., the node's role within the enterprise, software installed on the node, and known vulnerabilities/weaknesses of the node). An identifier lookup module determines a node's identifier based on characteristics of the node (such as IP address, host name, network zone, and/or MAC address), which are used as keys into lookup data structures. A category lookup module determines whether a particular node is a member of (i.e., within) a particular category using a transitive closure to model the categories (properties) that can be attached to an asset model. A transitive closure for a particular asset category is stored as a bitmap, similar to bitmap indexing.

Real-time identification of an asset model and categorization of an asset to assist in computer network security

A system can be configured using configuration objects that have the ability to refer to one another. In one embodiment, the present invention includes such a system having a plurality of objects used to configure the system, each object having a uniform resource identifier (URI), and an object reference table to enable the plurality of objects to reference each other without using URIs.

Growing community of inventors

Lucknow, India

Ankur Lahoti