Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Bluetalon, Inc.

Benjamin L Weintraub

Pratik Verma

Prasad Mujumdar

Systems, computer program products and methods implementing policy enforcement for search engines are described. A policy engine receives a user identifier associated with a search query including one or more query terms. The policy engine receives, from a preprocessor of a search engine, an intermediate representation of the search query. The intermediate representation includes one or more index terms corresponding to the one or more query terms. The policy engine determines, based on a particular policy, if the user is prohibited from accessing data associated with a particular index term. In response, the policy engine modifies the intermediate representation, including negating the particular index term. The policy engine then submits the modified intermediate representation to a query processing module of the search engine, causing the query processing module to exclude content corresponding to the particular index term from search results.

Policy enforcement for search engines

Systems, computer program products and methods implementing consensus-based policy management are described. A policy administration point communicates with multiple user devices through policy collaboration plugins. Each user device includes a computer through which an administrator can edit a policy. A first user device can obtain a policy from the policy administration point for editing. The first user device stores the edited policy in a policy store. The first user device notifies one or more second user devices of the edit. Administrators on the second user devices can approve or disapprove the edit. Each second user device notifies the first user device of a respective approval or disapproval. The first user device can determine whether the edit is acceptable based on consensus. The policy store can be implemented locally to the first user device, in a centralized place, or distributed as a blockchain.

Consensus-based policy management

Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on computer storage media, for managing, and enforcing policies on data security. A policy appliance includes a policy administration point, a policy decision point, a policy enforcement point and, optionally, an auditing module. The policy appliance can execute in a self-contained environment, e.g., a single virtual machine, a single physical machine, or a cluster of virtual machines or physical machines identically configured. The self-contained policy appliance can receive, manage, enforce and audit multiple policies that specify access privileges of multiple users on multiple databases. The databases can include heterogeneous databases that are configured separately and differently from one another. A single configuration of the policy appliance centralizes and unifies policy management of the heterogeneous database in the self-contained environment.

Growing community of inventors

Sunnyvale, CA, United States of America

Benjamin L Weintraub