Oracle International Corporation

Hari Vn Sastry

Uppili Srinivasan

Sirish V Vepa

Vrinda S Joshi

A unified authorization system for an enterprise that includes heterogeneous access control environments is provided. Components in the enterprise utilizing either Java Platform Security (JPS) or Oracle Access Manager (OAM) can both use the unified authorization system to perform authorization. A common policy store can contain policies applicable to diverse components in a canonical form conducive to varieties of access control models. The data model used within the common policy store can support access control features found in both role-based policies and delegable access control administration. The common policy store can enable the querying and retrieval of authorization policies that are based on various access control models. A unified administrator interface permits administrators of applications following any kind of access control model to administer policies for resources. A unified policy decision engine can evaluate whether authorization policies are satisfied, regardless of the access control models that those policies follow.

Authorization system for heterogeneous enterprise environments

An authorization system that conforms to legacy access control models provides mechanisms whereby structures already existing within those legacy access control models can be used to pass additional information to and from that authorization system. Legacy applications can still interact with the authorization system without modification. Because the authorization system also provides mechanisms whereby the existing structures can be used to pass the additional information or return additional information, more advanced applications can make use of enhanced access control features of the authorization system. Such enhanced features can involve policy-based decisions that take into account the additional information in determining whether to permit resource access. Such enhanced features can involve the placement of policy-specified obligations within the existing structures to be returned back to the advanced applications. Such obligations can indicate requirements that those applications need to fulfill in conjunction with performing operations on resources.

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Hari Vn Sastry