Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Oracle America, Inc.

Anshuman Mishra

Brandon Eugene Taylor

Subramanya Kumar

Jeffrey W Allen

Kumar Subramanya

A role passing and persistence mechanism that implements role-based access control at a container level is disclosed. In one implementation, the role passing and persistence mechanism provides one or more RBAC services. Functions provided by the role passing and persistence mechanism include role validating, role persisting and role administration. The role passing and persistence mechanism is used to persist role information for a session between a client and a container for any type of client. No matter which adaptor a client uses to connect to the container, the role passing and persistence mechanism provides a uniform method of passing role information to the container such that persisted role information can be used by any service hosted by the container after the session is established and the role information has been persisted.

Role passing and persistence mechanism for a container

An approach for managing functionalities within a system generally involves the use of indicators, such as privileges, that are associated with the functionalities. Each functionality is associated with an indicator that is used to determine whether the associated functionality is available for use by an end user. A determination is made that one or more particular functionalities are to be associated with the response because the particular indicator is included in the set of indicators and corresponds to the one or more functionalities. If the system includes functionalities for which indicators are not included in the set of indicators, those functionalities are not reflected in the response. The response is sent so that information regarding the one or more particular functionalities can be displayed via a user interface. In some implementations, an access control mechanism can use privileges for determining functionality availability and privileges for determining user access.

Approach for managing functionalities within a system

An access control mechanism that implements access control at a container level is disclosed. In one implementation, the access control mechanism provides one or more access control services, and registers these services with a container. Once registered, the access control services are exposed to other applications in the container, and those applications can invoke the services to have the access control mechanism implement access control on their behalf. The access control mechanism implements access control for all applications within the container; thus, the applications do not need to implement their own access control mechanisms. In addition, the access control mechanism is not an operating system component. Thus, by relying on the access control mechanism for access control functionality, the applications are not relying on any operating system component. As a result, the applications, the container, and the access control mechanism can be ported to and run on other operating systems/platforms.

Growing community of inventors

Westminster, CO, United States of America

Anshuman Mishra