Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Oracle America, Inc.

Dilli Dorai Minnal Arumugam

Aravindan Ranganathan

Shivaram Bhat

Ping Luo

Hua Cui

Rajeev Angal

Qingwen Cheng

Malla V Simhachalam

Heng-Ming Hsu

A mechanism is disclosed for enabling an attribute provider service (APS), which provides access to one or more attributes, to control access to the attributes at the attribute level. In one implementation, a request is received, which specifies a particular attribute that is desired to be accessed from an attribute repository. In response to this request, a policy that applies to the particular attribute is accessed. The policy is then processed to determine whether access to the particular attribute is to be allowed or denied. With the above mechanism, it is possible to control access to attributes at the attribute level rather than at the service level. Because access control is exercised at such a low level, an administrator can exercise much tighter and precise control over how attributes provided by an APS are accessed.

Fine-grained attribute access control

Methods and systems thereof for controlling access to resources are described. When a user attempts to access a resource via a remote interface such as a Web server, the request is initially evaluated by a source of policy definitions such as a policy server. This source returns a policy decision to the remote interface. The policy decision is stored in memory by the remote interface. The remote interface can then evaluate subsequent requests from the user for the resource using the stored policy decision instead of having to communicate again with the source for the policy decision. Enhancements to this approach are also described. Accordingly, policy definitions and decisions are more efficiently implemented.

Remote interface for policy decisions governing access control

An architecture for allowing extensibility to policies. The architecture has a policy component program that is able to evaluate and enforce polices. The architecture also has plugin modules for allowing a user to customize the polices. The policy component program is able to present interfaces to the user for customizing the polices. The policy component program is further able to integrate customized polices into a framework of the policy component program in response to user input that is based on the interfaces presented to the user. The presented interfaces may be for defining subjects in the policy program, defining conditions in the policy program, defining referrals in the policy program, defining resource names in the policy program, and defining how conflicts will be resolved in the policy program. The interfaces may be compliant with the JAVA programming language.

Plugin architecture for extending polices

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Cupertino, CA, United States of America

Dilli Dorai Minnal Arumugam