Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Ramaswamy Ranganathan

Paul J Leach

Mark Fishel Novak

Arun K Nanda

Vishal Agarwal

Nir Ben Zvi

Pranav Kukreja

David McPherson

Sunil P Gottumukkala

Jignesh Shah

Andrey Popov

Ming Tang

Resource authorization policies and resource scopes may be defined separately, thereby decoupling a set of authorization rules from the scope of resources to which those rules apply. In one example, a resource includes anything that can be used in a computing environment (e.g., a file, a device, etc.). A scope describes a set of resources (e.g., all files in folder X, all files labeled 'Y', etc.). Policies describe what can be done with a resource (e.g., 'read-only,' &#x201c;read/write,&#x201d; &#x201c;delete, if requestor is a member of the admin group,&#x201d; etc.). When scopes and policies have been defined, they may be linked, thereby indicating that the policy applies to any resource within the scope. When a request for the resource is made, the request is evaluated against all policies associated with scopes that contain the resource. If the conditions specified in the policies apply, then the request may be granted.

Scoped resource authorization policies

A policy that governs access to a resource may be tested against real-world access requests before being used to control access to the resource. In one example, access to a resource is governed by a policy, referred to as an effective policy. When the policy is to be modified or replaced, the modification or replacement may become a test policy. When a request is made to access the resource, the request may be evaluated under both the effective policy and the test policy. Whether access is granted is determined under the effective policy, but the decision that would be made under the test policy is noted, and may be logged. If the test policy is determined to behave acceptably when confronted with real-world access requests, then the current effective policy may be replaced with the test policy.

Testing access policies

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Ramaswamy Ranganathan