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US 12,615,279 B2Granted
Voting as last resort access to prevent erroneous or malicious changes
AssigneeDell Products L.P.
InventorsOfir Ezrielev, Lee Serfaty, Yehiel Zohar
Life of this patent
Estimating the term…
Abstract
Preventing, mitigating, and reversing actions in a computing system. A voting mechanism is provided that is configured to block malicious or accidental configuration changes or other actions in a computing system. Risky actions cannot be performed as the voting mechanism requires certain actions to be subject to a vote. The actions are then, based on the voting by other administrators, allowed, disallowed, prevented, or reversed. Further different classes of administrators can participate in the voting operations.
Claims18
A method, executed by one or more processors of a computing system that provides identity and access management services, the method comprising:
- detecting a request to perform an action that modifies a configuration, certificate, or access control setting in a computing system associated with a user;
- classifying, by a risk analysis module of the computing system, the action request as normal, anomalous, or high-risk based on a computed risk score using contextual data of the user and the action;
- automatically suspending execution of the action request pending authorization;
- initiating, by a voting engine of the computing system, an automated voting operation related to the suspended action request by selecting a first class of administrators or a second class of administrators, wherein initiating the voting operation includes collecting cryptographically authenticated votes from the selected class of administrators of the computing system via digitally signed, time-stamped transaction messages transmitted through a secure administrator interface;
- determining results of the voting operation by verifying digital signatures of the received votes and computing a quorum result;
- and
- performing a voting action based on when the results exceed a threshold requirement, wherein the threshold requirement is higher when the selected class of administrators is the second class of administrators, wherein the voting action includes automatically executing, by the computing system without manual intervention, one or more corrective security actions based on the authenticated voting result, including presenting each of the administrators in the selected class with a secure user interface that identifies the suspended action request and presents options including at least one of:
- preventing the action from being performed if the action has not been performed;
- reversing the action if the action has already been performed;
- performing the action if the action has not been performed;
- allowing the action to stand as performed;
- determining that the action is malicious;
- and
- revoking access of the user to the computing system by automatically revoking or re-issuing a corresponding digital certificate associated with the user.
11 more elements
A non-transitory storage medium having stored therein instructions that are executable by one or more hardware processors to perform operations comprising:
- detecting a request to perform an action that modifies a configuration, certificate, or access control setting in a computing system associated with a user;
- classifying, by a risk analysis module executed by the hardware processors, the action request as normal, anomalous, or high-risk based on a computed risk score;
- automatically suspending execution of the action request pending approval;
- initiating, by a voting engine of the computing system, an automated voting operation related to the suspended action request by selecting a first class of administrators or a second class of administrators, wherein initiating the voting operation includes collecting cryptographically authenticated votes that are digitally signed by each administrator's certificate from the selected class of administrators;
- determining, by the voting engine, results of the authenticated voting operation by verifying the digital signatures and computing a quorum result;
- and
- performing an automated corrective action based on when the results exceed a threshold requirement, wherein the threshold requirement is higher when the selected class of administrators is the second class of administrators, wherein the automated corrective action includes automatically controlling execution of the action request by enabling or blocking the modification based on the authenticated voting result and presenting each administrator with a secure interface that displays the suspended action and authenticated vote status, including options to:
- preventing the action from being performed if the action has not been performed;
- reversing the action if the action has already been performed;
- performing the action if the action has not been performed;
- allowing the action to stand as performed;
- determining that the action is malicious;
- and
- revoking access of the user to the computing system.
11 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.