EnterSpace Security Suite™ for Homeland Security

Run-time security decisioning including authentication support, coarse-to-fine-grained authorization, and federated attribute retrieval: vertical & horizontal information sharing on a need-to-know basis.

Homeland security is among the top priorities of all public and quasi-public agencies; from the federal level down to individual municipalities. The United States finds itself in a state of war — but a war far different than any the nation has ever faced. The current Administration has implemented the most sweeping reorganization of the federal government in the last half-century in response this new threat.

Common Information Sharing Method — One prominent theme that emerges in discussing homeland security is the need for a massive common information network built to share and disseminate information among the many agencies and constituencies involved. However, to be truly effective for homeland security, the network will have to be more than just a super network linking various public agencies; as the greatest challenge within this network will be determining a user’s need-to-know in a dynamic and fluid environment. In a real-time, terrorist-prone world, the answer to the need-to-know question changes from situation-to-situation, and second-to-second. Even within small organizations, the administrative cost of managing users' permissions is non-trivial. Given the user population and number of applications/ files that must be shared to make for effective defense our Homeland; today's enterprise access management solutions can not provide a cost-effective, scalable, common information sharing method. That is, until now. Jericho Systems' EnterSpace Security Suite provides a CLEAR and CONSISTENT method for sharing information and data across organizations involved in homeland security.

Every Request for a Secured Resource Is Individually Authorized — While many solutions exist within the access management and authorization space for organizations with a role in homeland security, most lack true real-time functionality. Those who need-to-know are identified statically and saved in an access-control-list (ACL) by a human administrator. The result is that the security model is only as current as the ACL, leading to coarse or poorly controlled security models and holes in the enterprise's security posture. As user community size increases and the number of secured resources under management continues to grow, maintenance of ACLs becomes progressively more prohibitive.

Many organizations have responded by “batching” updates to the ACL to minimize the volatility, but unfortunately this means that security decisions are only as accurate as the ACL is current. Traditional ACL driven models are inherently out of date, in that what is being saved is the RESULT of a security policy being applied to user-specific information. Therefore, the ACL is only as current as the moment it was created. The inability of this model to provide security implementations that accurately reflect “right-now” information has prevented enterprises from sharing with users all the information they might have a legitimate need-to-know — in effect; it has built walls that limit information sharing, creating information stovepipes strewn throughout the enterprise. The EnterSpace Security Suite makes a real-time decision for every request to allow fine-grained, context-sensitive access decisions that are based upon CURRENT user information and configurable security policies. It is time to tear down the walls between the enterprise and its users.

For Example — A threat to the country is identified, and a very limited time window is available in which to react. The most important mission is to get the right information into the hands of those who have to respond — without exposing that information to anyone who does not need-to-know. This is a classic problem in the intelligence and security space, and can be extremely complex to implement. In the past, compromises have had to be made because there was no viable framework available to manage the “need-to-know” permissions, especially as the Internet has drastically increased user populations. With our software tool, access management policies can readily be defined to analyze, based upon the user’s attributes, whether they fit the profile of “need-to-know”, and this analysis can be performed in real-time, at the exact moment when the user attempts to access a secured resource.

This provides the capability to use up to the minute user attribute information in the access decision, as well as contextual information about the situation itself. For example, assume there is a bio-terrorism threat in a mall in Atlanta. Based upon security policies that have been previously defined, the EnterSpace Security Suite can control to a very fine level of granularity who gets access to particular information. Local first responder teams in the Atlanta area would be granted access to the entire body of data required to respond and contain the threat, while emergency services in surrounding areas would receive a filtered preparedness notice identifying the type of threat and required preparations. Security forces across the country would be given a notice of the threat, stripped of sensitive details. At each and every access request, the requester’s need-to-know would be analyzed and taken into account, giving the user all the information they needed, without exposing information that would constitute a security breach.

Security Policies Centrally and Easily Administered; Enterprise-Wide — With Jericho Systems, security is a function brought to the enterprise level. Currently, security is managed on an application-by-application basis. From the ground up, the EnterSpace Security Suite is built for distributed administration of the security policies, allowing the owners of the resources being managed to directly control the policies defining access throughout the enterprise. This is a substantial change from traditional security models, where access controls are maintained both by the programmers who implement the code that checks the ACL, and by the security groups who maintain the ACLs themselves. The requirements of the resource owners are thus at least two steps removed from the decision, and the ability to effect change in the security policy is frequently inhibited by programmer availability. With our software tool, policy changes can be implemented by the resource owners directly, in real-time, and will be reflected upon the very next request for the secured resource. In addition, the GUI for the management of security policies is built for the non-technical, but business-savvy administrator.

Quickly Leverage Current Enterprise Investments for Increased Security Functionality — The EnterSpace Security Suite is designed to quickly integrate with previously deployed technologies including; identity management and authentication mechanisms.

Secure, Detailed Logs Provide Single-Point Auditability — Each time a request is made, the EnterSpace Security Suite writes a detailed event log to a repository. This log contains ALL the information relevant to the decision, including the identity of the requestor, the resource the requestor tried to access, the version of the policy used to determine whether to grant the request, any/all data values used in making the decision and the resulting decision itself. This log can be written to almost any storage form, including WORM (Write Once, Read Many) devices for non-changeable audit logs, or a database for handling reporting and ad-hoc queries.

Real-Time Alarms Allow “Right-Now” Response to Inappropriate Requests — When a request is denied for any reason, the EnterSpace Security Suite provides a mechanism whereby an alarm condition may be delivered to a system responsible for notifying individuals or components to respond to the event. For example, assume an employee is attempting to access a secured resource that is highly sensitive: sensitive enough that any denied request should initiate an alarm. Within the tool’s security policy definition process, an option is available to cause an alarm condition to be raised upon denial. At run-time, when the user’s access attempt is denied, the EnterSpace Security Suite generates an alarm message which details the user’s identity, the resource requested, and the reasons for the denial; then delivers it to a system of your choice. This might be an SNMP interface to an enterprise management console, an alert to a paging system, or any other form of electronic notification.

Collaboration — While information has long been perceived as having value within the business environment, the true value is actually in the solutions that can be derived from it. And in order to do that, information must be shared among all the people and systems that have a part to play in bringing those solutions to life. This collaborative process has been limited severely in the past by the inability to share information freely among the participants while maintaining security of the data itself. Like water in a lake, your data has enormous potential. The water realizes that potential when it is put into motion to create energy. By enabling the sharing of information securely, the EnterSpace Security Suite helps put your data into motion to create business value.

TO SUMMARIZE: With the EnterSpace Security Suite, Organizations Involved in Homeland Security Gain Numerous Solutions; Including:

• Real-Time Access Management with Sensitivity to the Decision Context — As every request for access causes the evaluation of the appropriate security policy against user and situational attributes; fluid conditions like Homeland Security Threat Status, time-of-day, strength of authentication, duty-time, etc., can be factored into access management polices.
• Create, Modify and Implement Enterprise Security Policies in Seconds — Security policies are managed by a common infrastructure and immediately affect the entire user community.
• Consistent Security Policy Evaluation, Enterprise-Wide — For secured resources under management by the software tool, the human element is eliminated from the evaluation process to improve security and reduce administrative costs.
• Distribute Security Policy Administration to Subject-Matter-Experts — Whoever owns the resource (application, function within an application, physical door, etc.) can administer the security policy for the resource without the need of software engineers.
• Flexible and Scaleable — While the EnterSpace Security Suite is built to work at the enterprise level; the tool's deployment can be limited to areas where current security models are ineffective or costly. This allows for quick and flexible impact. Pick the lowest hanging fruit first; then scale as needed. Resources that function well with existing security models can work side-by-side with resources that make use of the Suite for access management and authorization.
• Single Point Auditability — A secure event log captures information about the entire session, forming a single point for auditability and compliance purposes.
• Generate Alarms and Alerts at the Time of Attempted Violation — No need to parse through log files to find security breaches.
• Web Services Security, Single-Sign-On and Single-Sign-Out — One tool for an enterprise solution.
• Access Portals for Information Sharing and Collaboration — Controlled, 1-to-1 access portals for information sharing and collaboration are quickly enabled.
• Physical Security Management — The tool can also be used to manage physical security with the same consistent, rules-based infrastructure.

Homeland Security Organizations’ ROI in Jericho Systems is Derived from:

• Increased Security, Access and Next Generation Information Sharing — through real-time authorization deriving permissions and entitlements at run-time.
• Decreased Costs — through minimized administration of security; lessen the administrative burden of security polices, access control lists, user groups and security audits.
• Decreased Costs — through increased productivity brought about by single-point auditability and real-time alarms and alerts.
• Decreased Costs — of software engineering. Externalizing security decisioning to a callable network service can drastically reduce code bases and thereby application development cycle times.

The EnterSpace Security Suite can perform hundreds of thousands of authorization decisions per second, for user communities and resources (items to be secured) in the tens-of-millions, in a real-time, parallel scaling, fault-tolerant environment.