Compositional reasoning techniques for role reachability analyses in identity systems

Abstract

Techniques are described for using compositional reasoning techniques to perform role reachability analyses relative to collections of user accounts and roles of a cloud provider network. Delegated role-based resource management generally is a method for controlling access to resources in cloud provider networks and other distributed systems. Many cloud provider networks, for example, implement identity and access management subsystems using this approach, where the concept of 'roles' is used to specify which resources can be accessed by people, software, or (recursively) by other roles. An abstraction of the role reachability analysis is provided that can be used as input to a model-checking application to reason about such role reachability questions (e.g., which roles of an organization are reachable from other roles).