International Business Machines Corporation

Brian James Turner

Anthony Scott Moran

Peter Sean Calvert

Ivan Matthew Milman

Heather Maria Hinton

Birgit Monika Pfitzmann

Scott Anthony Exton

Matthias Schunter

Gavin George Bray

Ian Glazer

Gregory Scott Clark

Venkat Raghavan

Michael Andrew Powell

Warwick Leslie Burrows

Guenter Karioth

Shane Weeden

George R Blakley Iii

A method and a system are presented in which federated domains interact within a federated environment. Domains within a federation can initiate federated single-sign-on operations for a user at other federated domains. A point-of-contact server within a domain relies upon a trust proxy within the domain to manage trust relationships between the domain and the federation. Trust proxies interpret assertions from other federated domains as necessary. Trust proxies may have a trust relationship with one or more trust brokers, and a trust proxy may rely upon a trust broker for assistance in interpreting assertions. When a user is provisioned at a particular federated domain, the federated domain can provision the user to other federated domains within the federated environment. A provision operation may include creating or deleting an account for a user, pushing updated user account information including attributes, and requesting updates on account information including attributes.

Method and system for federated provisioning

Access Control Lists control permitted actions on protected network computer system resources by providing an access control policy associated with the requested protected system resource containing a permission list of permitted identities and at least one action group tag with associated action indicators; reusing a finite quantity of action indicators among a plurality of action group tags to control a number of unique permissions less than or equal to the product of the quantity of allowable action indicators and a quantity of allowable action group tags; evaluating the permission list according to a specific permission definition associated with the action group tag, the permission definition providing a correlation between members of a set of action indicators; and granting authorization to perform actions on the requested protected system resource to the requesting user if the access control policy permission list includes an appropriate action indicator correlated to an action group tag.

Grouped access control list actions

A method is presented for obtaining information from a client for the benefit of a server using a particular communication protocol that the server does not implement. A primary server receives a client-generated request, and the primary server sends a first request to a secondary server as part of the processing of the client-generated request. While processing the first request, the secondary server determines a need for data obtainable from a client application that supports user interaction using a communication protocol for which the secondary server is not configured to implement. The secondary server sends a second request to the primary server for obtaining data that results from using the communication protocol. The secondary server subsequently receives the resulting data and continues to process the first request using the resulting data, after which the secondary server returns a response for the first request to the primary server.

Method for access by server-side components using unsupported communication protocols through passthrough mechanism

Access Control Lists (ACLs) are used to describe the permitted actions (permissions) on protected network computer system resources or objects associated with an client or user identity. An identity may be an individual user or group of users. The actions are used to represent the different access methods available on a particular projected object or resource. A new action grouping mechanism is provided which tags each action with an action group name. The grouping of actions facilitates a larger permission set to be defined in an ACL, whereas action permission indicators can be reused for unique action definitions within various action groups. This effectively extends the finite total number of permissions available within a security system, allows a more descriptive and extensible permission mechanism in an Access Control List, as well as aiding in the simplification of management and definition of security policies.

An enterprise computing environment such as a corporate web portal includes an intermediary server, a sign on service, and one or more backend enterprise systems managed by resource managers. Before or after user primary logon, which establishes a user primary account identity, the intermediary server uses its own identity to authenticate to the sign on service its right to retrieve user secondary account identities with respect to the backend enterprise systems. Retrieved secondary account identities are then used by the intermediary server to perform user secondary logons to respective resource managers in the environment. The intermediary server also manages the passing of resource requests and associated replies between the user and the resource managers.

Method of enabling an intermediary server to impersonate a client user's identity to a plurality of authentication domains

An administration model is provided that uses access control lists to define permissions for users and groups of users. The model identifies a number of objects to be administered. Associated with each of these objects is a set of administrative operations that can be performed on the object. For each of these operations a permission in an access control list entry is defined. The protected resources are arranged in a hierarchical fashion and an access control list can be associated with any point in the hierarchy. The access control list provides fine-grained control over the protected resources. At the time an administrator requests to perform an operation, the administrator's identification is used to look up the prevailing access control list to determine whether the operation is permitted.

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Santa Cruz, CA, United States of America

Brian James Turner