Emc Corporation

Nirav Mehta

Ari Juels

Gareth Richards

Riaz Zolfonoon

In a software-as-a-service system, a federated relationship is established between a first tenant subsystem (host) and a user account on a second tenant subsystem (guest), the federated relationship including visibility controls in the host specifying resources made accessible to an authorized user of the user account. When a guest user accesses the host, an authentication is performed that includes requesting and receiving from the guest a security assertion that the user has been authenticated by the guest as the authorized user. Each tenant subsystem includes mechanisms for authenticating its own users for access control; the cross-tenancy authentication extends this operation to make and accept authentication assertions from other tenants. A second risk-based authentication may be performed for additional confidence, typically based on comparing circumstances for the present access to circumstances for past accesses.

Secure cross-tenancy federation in software-as-a-service system

An authentication technique involves receiving an authentication request which includes a set of authentication factors and performing, in response to the authentication request, an authentication operation based on a set of authentication factors. An authentication result of the authentication operation identifies a particular trust category among a set of trust categories. Each trust category of the set defines a unique set of user permissions. The technique further involves providing the authentication result for use by a web application. The particular trust category identified by the authentication result defines a particular set of user permissions to be imposed by the web application. For example, the trust categories may take the form of trust levels such as Low, Med, and High which control access to certain resources. Furthermore, the technique involves providing periodic and/or random authentication requests to the authentication server to detect hijacking of the user session after successful initial authentication.

Internet-accessible service for dynamic authentication and continuous assertion of trust level in identities

Servers are configured to operate in two or more threshold security planes with each such threshold security plane implementing at least a portion of a corresponding threshold security protocol involving at least a subset of the servers. The servers are implemented on at least one processing device comprising a processor coupled to a memory. Multiple ones of the servers may be implemented on a single processing device, or each of the servers may be implemented on a separate processing device. At least one of the servers may be part of at least two of the threshold security planes. A given request for a protected resource is processed through each of the planes in order for a corresponding user to obtain access to the protected resource. By way of example, the security planes may comprise two or more of an authentication plane, an access control plane and a resource plane.

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Shrewsbury, MA, United States of America

Nirav Mehta