Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Raghavendra Malpani

Cristian Marius Ilac

Tanmoy Dutta

Sushil Kumar

Bartosz Henryk Paliswiat

Joseph A Porkka

Christian Bøgh Jensen

Robert Eric Fitzgerald

Bo Lu

Eric Fitzgerald

Klaus Schultz

A tool facilitates a balancing of security with usability enabling secure user access to multiple secure sites and locations from several computing devices. Access to the multiple secure sites and locations occur by utilizing a roamable credential store (RCS), which is highly resistant to offline attack. The RCS facilitates a protected Unified Credential Vault (UCV) via a multi-stage encryption process such that user credentials are protected by making offline dictionary attacks prohibitively expensive to an attacker without causing usability to deteriorate commensurately.

Secure and usable protection of a roamable credentials store

Retrieving content items based on a social distance between a user and content providers. The social distance is determined based on, for example, user interaction with the content providers. The content providers are ranked, for the user, based on the determined social distance. Prior to a request from the user, the content items are pre-fetched based on the ranked content providers and constraints such as storage space, bandwidth, and battery power level of a computing device of the user. In some embodiments, additional content items are retrieved, or retrieved content items are deleted, as a variable-size cache on the computing device fills or changes size.

Pre-fetching content items based on social distance

A secure (e.g., HTTPS) connection is established between a client and a server. Communication over the connection may utilize an application (e.g., a Web browser) that is not part of the client's trusted computing base. A password is sent from the client to the server over the connection such that the clear text password is unavailable to the application. For example, the password can be encrypted and inserted directly into the HTTPS stream from the client's trusted computing base.

Communicating a password securely

A tool which facilitates a balancing of security with usability enabling secure user access to multiple secure sites and locations from several computing devices utilizing a roamable credential store (RCS) which is highly resistant to offline attack. The RCS facilitates a protected Unified Credential Vault (UCV) via a multi-stage encryption process such that user credentials are protected by making offline dictionary attacks prohibitively expensive to an attacker without causing usability to deteriorate commensurately.

System performance may be optimized, and extraneous audit noise reduced, by providing the capability of exercising a fine degree of control over individual audit events. A user such as an auditor interested in an individual audit event can obtain desired results without also obtaining results of all other individual audit events in the category containing the individual audit event. Additionally, audits may be obtained on either a per-user basis or on a system-wide basis. In this way, the auditor may tailor auditing events without regard to the auditing events established for other users of the system. Thus, there is a capability of establishing auditing policies for the entire system, in which case all users of the system may obtain results of the system-wide auditing.

Per-user and system granular audit policy implementation

A method of generating a computer user activity log for a user belonging to a specially monitored group includes allowing a user to logon to a local computer. The local computer verifying the user account credentials and creating a user logon session. A token is created by the local computer for identification of any group membership with which the user associated and also having the user access privileges. The group information in the token is compared with a specially monitored group list. The specially monitored group list may be obtained from a domain server or may be configured locally. If the user has membership in the specially monitored group, then a special logon session is created and activities of the user are recorded.

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Raghavendra Malpani