Hewlett-Packard Company

Guillermo Rozas

Alan Hersh Karp

Rajiv Gupta

Sandeep Kumar

Arindam Banerji

Venkatesh Krishnan

Chia-Chiang Chao

Ernest Mak

Alexandre Bronstein

A software system that provides access control to resources and that disassociates access rights to resources from references to resources to prevent the formation of large and unwieldy access control lists and to enable advanced decentralized security controls. The software system includes a repository that holds a resource descriptor for each resource including lock/permission pairs. Access to particular resources or groups of resources is provided by providing users with the appropriate keys. The keys are themselves are resources with resource descriptors in the repository. Access rights for users may be revoked by deleting keys from the repository. The software system also provides visibility fields for compartmentalizing access to resources. In addition, the software system provides authorizers that maintain audit trails when critical resource such as keys are passed among users and that enable advanced security control when passing resources among users.

Resource access control in a software system

A software infrastructure for providing an open digital services marketplace including a naming manager that enables a requesting task to refer to a desired resource using a name which is local to the requesting task and a router that forwards the request to an appropriate handler for the desired resource and that enables at least one additional task to be invoked in response to the request. The infrastructure includes a permission manager that compares a set of access rights of the requesting task to the desired resource to a set of permissions associated with the desired resource such that the access rights are kept separately from the reference to the desired resource. The desired resource, the requesting task, the additional task, and a set of additional components used to handle the request are each modeled as a resource defined by a corresponding set of meta-data which includes a set of attributes and a reference to a grammar for interpreting the attributes.

Infrastructure for an open digital services marketplace

Growing community of inventors

Mountain View, CA, United States of America

Guillermo Rozas