International Business Machines Corporation

Bertrand Be-Chung Chiu

Ching-Yun Chao

Ki Hong Park

John Y-c Chang

John Yow-Chun Chang

Yuhsuke Kaneyasu

Jay William Warfield

Douglas Yellow Shue

Exposure of sensitive information to users and other servers is controlled by using a first security token which contains a user identity and one or more user credentials associated with a first user; a second security token which contains an identity of a token issuer and an identity of a first owning process; and at least a first trusted server which accesses a downstream computing service on behalf of the first user by substituting or combining the first security token and the second security token, while preventing the second security token from being exposed to the first user. This establishes a first security sensitivity level for the first user and a second security sensitivity level for the first trusted server, wherein the first security sensitivity level is a lower access level than the second security sensitivity level for the downstream service.

Controlling exposure of sensitive data and operation using process bound security tokens in cloud computing environment

Exposure of sensitive information to users is controlled using a first security token containing user identity and user credentials to represent the user who requests services, and a second security token containing two other identities, one identifying the token issuer and the other identifying the owning process. When requesting services, the token-owning process sends a security token to indicate who is making the request, and uses its key to digitally sign the request. The token-owning process signs the request to indicate that it endorses the request. A receiving server accepts a request if (1) the token-owning process endorses the request by signing the request; (2) the token is valid (token is signed by its issuer and the digital signature is verified and unexpired); (3) user entity, which can be a real user or a deployment or a server process, that is represented by the token has the authorization to access the specified resources; and (4) the token-owning process is authorized to endorse the user entity represented by the token to access the specified resources.

A cloud deployment appliance includes a mechanism to enable permitted users to move event records reliably from an internal event log of the appliance to a data store located external to the appliance while ensuring the integrity of event records. The mechanism ensures that the event records are not tampered with in storage or during download. Further, the approach ensures that no event records can be removed from the appliance internal storage before being successfully downloaded to the external data store.

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Austin, TX, United States of America

Bertrand Be-Chung Chiu