SEQUOIA: A Middleware Supporting Policy-Based Access Control for Search and Aggregation in Data-Driven Applications

Bogaerts, Jasper; Lagaisse, Bert; Joosen, Wouter

doi:10.1109/tdsc.2018.2889309

Cited by 4 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…The result set of this query is then passed back to Bouncer, which uses a postfilter to exclude any unauthorized records. However, postfiltering does not scale well for large result sets [3].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…ThunQ is designed to efficiently enforce a consistent set of authorization policies on distributed application services and data. ThunQ combines partial policy evaluation [26] and query rewriting [2,3] to enforce authorization policies both early and lazily. Early enforcement denies unauthorized requests as soon as possible, while lazy enforcement pushes access decisions further down the distributed control flow.…”

Section: Thunq Middlewarementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Sequoia [3] combines the strengths of FGAC and Bouncer by rewriting database queries based on XACML policies. This approach results in low latency enforcement of expressive policies, even in systems with a large number of users.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, these solutions require that sensitive data is brought outside of its microservice context. Other related work focuses on enforcing access control in application databases [3,16,24]. These solutions aim to restrict access by enforcing fine-grained authorization policies on the data records by either rewriting the original database query [3], defining authorization views [24] or by filtering database records after retrieving them from the database [16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Other related work focuses on enforcing access control in application databases [3,16,24]. These solutions aim to restrict access by enforcing fine-grained authorization policies on the data records by either rewriting the original database query [3], defining authorization views [24] or by filtering database records after retrieving them from the database [16]. However, securing database access is only a part of the challenges to enforce a consistent set of authorization policies over a large number of microservices.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

ThunQ: A Distributed and Deep Authorization Middleware for Early and Lazy Policy Enforcement in Microservice Applications

Sauwens

Beni

Jannes

et al. 2021

Service-Oriented Computing

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Online software services are often designed as multi-tenant, API-based, microservice architectures. However, sharing service instances and storing sensitive data in a shared data store causes significant security risks. Application-level access control plays a key role in mitigating this risk by preventing unauthorized access to the application and data. Moreover, a microservice architecture introduces new challenges for access control on online services, as both the application logic and data are highly distributed. First, unauthorized requests should be denied as soon as possible, preferably at the facade API. Second, sensitive data should stay in the context of its microservice during policy evaluation. Third, the set of policies enforced on a single application request should be consistent for the entire distributed control flow. To solve these challenges, we present ThunQ, a distributed authorization middleware that enforces authorization policies both early at the facade API, as well as lazily by postponing authorization decisions to the appropriate data context. To achieve this, ThunQ leverages two techniques called partial evaluation and query rewriting, which support policy enforcement both at the facade API, as well as deep in the data tier.We implemented and open-sourced ThunQ as a set of reusable components for the Spring Cloud and Data ecosystem. Experimental results in an application case study show that ThunQ can efficiently enforce authorization policies in microservice applications, with acceptable increases in latency as the number of tenants and access rules grow.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Thunq Middlewarementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%