Dynamic authorization management

Authorization management is becoming increasingly popular. But there are, in fact, two very different approaches:

Static authorization management, where changes are provisioned to the target systems.
Dynamic authorization management, where authorization decisions are externalized to authorization engines at runtime.

The latter require changes to the applications, but they lead to the externalization of authentication and authorization (and hopefully as well auditing) from applications. Everything can be easily managed from outside of the applications.

Whilst static authorization management is provided by provisioning systems (at the more technical level) and by several GRC vendors (from a business control perspective), vendors of solutions for dynamic authorization management are still relatively rare and, besides this, in most cases relatively small. Besides Oracle with their Entitlements Server and, to some degree, CA with their Embedded Entitlements Manager, vendors include companies like Bitkoo or Engiweb, to name some of the two which are particularly interesting. And, for sure, Microsoft's approach for claims leads in that direction - but at least in the current approach, authorization decisions aren't externalized yet.

From my perspective, externalizing these decisions from applications definitely makes sense. Policies can be managed centrally, changes are effective immediately, and application developers don't have to think much about security. They just rely on external decisions. In fact, things are moved from coding not only to deployment, but to runtime.

There are three challenges:

The authorization engines have to be fast
They have to be integratable with other IAM/GRC tools for a consistent management
The applications have to be adopted to a specific solution

The first part is just an architecture and engineering task which has been solved by several vendors. The second requires, from my perspective, standards for the description and exchange of policies which are still widely missing. The third part could also be addressed by standards. That would give customers the choice between different authorization engines. As long as these standards are missing, customers should, with respect to the last bullet point, focus on implementations which require few changes in applications to minimize the risks of vendor lock-in. On the other hand, the advantages of such approaches are significant - and vendors like Bitkoo and Engiweb are succesful because of that fact.

From my perspective, companies should start looking at these approaches today and really start externalizing security out of the code.

By the way: We've given our European Identity Award in the category best innovation in 2008 to some of the vendors mentioned above. Attend European Identity Conference 2009 and learn, amongst many other things, who will be awarded as innovator this year.

The need for standards