We Need To Dump Our Role-based Security World!

One of our most successful spin-outs is Symphonic. Why? Because they do something that everyone agrees that is right, but few actually properly implement it. The basis of Symphonic is the integration of context, roles and attributes into the rights to every element of data or service, and then integrate that into a governance engine. For interdomain rights, you define a policy with roles and attributes, and the service that you are connecting to, and the governance engine tells you which role proofs and attributes you need to gather, and which of these are trusted. You then gather these, and the governance engine makes the choice as to whether you can get access to the service. In a Microsoft domain world, you get access because you have proven your role and your ID, and, typically, that it. The whole thing just doesn’t scale, and increasingly is at the core of most security breaches.

Our role-based world?

In our world, we all have roles … a father, a teacher, a GP … it is how we get certain rights. But, just because I am a teacher, doesn’t mean I can automatically teach French. And so I might then have to define the role of a teacher of secondary school French. But then we have all the other subjects. Then, because I am a French teacher in one school, can I teach in other schools, and so it goes on. With a role-based…