The entitlement and access management equation

Hopefully I'm not having a "mad-scientist moment"...

Hypothesis:
Web access management = Coarse-grained access management
Entitlement management = Fine-grained access management + XACML

Argument:
I've always poo poo-ed the whole notion of entitlement management and even blogged about it some time ago (Daniel Raskin from Sun had similar thoughts). It's not because I don't think it's necessary; quite the contrary.

Good access management is crucial within any enterprise security architecture. It doesn't need to be the first thing you implement, but it should be pretty darned high on the list. It saves time and money in the long run and makes things so much easier to design, build and manage. Not to mention when the audit and compliance people come knocking, a lot of the information is available from a central location (I didn't say "all the information" because it's wishful thinking that any organisation can get every system's access controls centrally managed).

Notice something? I said access management, because that's all entitlement management really is; fine-grained access management. The main reason I've never particularly been taken by the whole notion of entitlement management was because I didn't agree with the industry's need to tag it as such. As far as I was concerned, it was just access management (or authorisation as some prefer to say). There was no need for a new name because we've all been doing access control for a long time right? Apparently not. The marketing machines started spinning not so long ago and all of a sudden, it's "New School Identity Management" (note: you may have to register to read the article).

The marketing people would have us believe that before entitlement management products came along, all the industry was capable of doing was web access management. That is, URL-level access controls. And if we needed to have finer-grained access controls, we would just throw our hands up and say "nup, product doesn't do that and we'll have to write our own or just ignore it". As Guy Kawasaki would say, this is BULL-SHIITAKE! Or perhaps I joined the Identity and Access Management (IAM) world with rose-coloured glasses.

Early on in my stint at IBM, I worked for the Security and Privacy Services team. My very first Identity and Access Management (IAM) project was actually entitlement management focused with some aspects around web access management. At the time, the term "entitlement management" didn't exist the way it does today. As far as we were concerned, we were implementing access management; both coarse and fine-grained. And it was on this project that I first got my hands VERY dirty with Tivoli Access Manager for e-business (TAM) and Tivoli Directory Server (TDS). I'll talk more about this in a follow-up blog post or this will get too long and you'll all fall asleep.

I've had a few more opportunities to work with TAM (and all the other IBM Tivoli Security products) and it is because of my various experiences with the products that I haven't stopped wondering why companies like IBM bothered to build a completely brand new product to handle entitlement management (in IBM's case they now have Tivoli Security Policy Manager). TAM does have a few potential issues when it comes to entitlement management as we know it today. For example:

1. If you need to model contextual policies that rely on user attributes and getting your hands dirty scares you, then you'll find it a little bit challenging.
2. It doesn't have standard support for eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) out of the box.
3. It doesn't have a nice, standardised web services layer for other applications to integrate with (it does however, have APIs but these aren't typically what we would call "services").
   

That said, TAM did have a XACML toolkit which (update: Neil Readshaw, one of my ex-colleagues at IBM and a worldwide authority on TAM assures me there was never any XACML support in TAM whatsoever. I must have been drinking too much of the kool-aid when I worked for IBM Tivoli) I'm sure product management and development could have rolled XACML support into the core product. They could also have very easily opened up the console (or even built a whole new one that was easier to use) to allow for easier administration of contextual access policies and even expanded on the policy model to do more fancy things (alternatively you can use a provisioning product to fill in the gaps). As for web services, that isn't too difficult to build into TAM. They built a whole federated identity management product on top of it. Why not an entitlement management one?

I've seen Tivoli Security Policy Manager (TSPM) in action and it doesn't add very much on top of what TAM already does (and has been doing for years). And now, customers have to manage 2 separate policy stores for 2 products that do very similar things! You heard me right; TAM and TSPM have different policy stores and management interfaces. I realise I'm picking on IBM yet again, but this is true of many vendors that have separate web access management and entitlement management products.

So why the sudden emergence of entitlement management when I insist it's been there all along? If you followed the link back to my earlier rants about entitlement management, you may have noticed I had a rather involved public conversation with Securent's (now owned by Cisco) CEO Rajiv Gupta. Upon reading the discussion again, we seemed to be debating entitlement management vs fine-grained authorisation based on different definitions, assumptions and agendas.

This suggests that what fine-grained authorisation lacked was a standard way to define everything; enter XACML. If we could talk about everything using common terms, an understanding of where everything fit and what a policy looks like, then we might get somewhere. The same goes for systems: there needed to be a way for them to leverage authorisation services in a standarised way. So I put forward that entitlement management is simply fine-grained authorisation + XACML. Standardisation and interoperability were the missing ingredients in taking fine-grained authorisation mainstream. Perhaps another ingredient was that many companies weren't ready to worry about fine-grained authorisation yet as they were still busy with provisioning and coarse-grained authorisation (i.e. web access management).

I'll finish with the following points:

1. If you can't tell, I like TAM (but I'm biased because I cut my IAM teeth using it).
   
2. If you have a web access management product, make an effort to sit down and evaluate whether you REALLY need an entitlement management product. If you also have a provisioning product on top of your web access management product, then you REALLY need to think about whether you REALLY need an entitlement management product. Is XACML support a good enough reason to buy a whole new product? Do you really need XACML at this stage of your project? Can you talk the vendor into building XACML support into their web access management product?
   
3. I like Sun's approach of rolling fine-grained access control/entitlement management capabilities into their core web access management product (note: unfortunately, I have a feeling Oracle will throw OpenSSO aside in favour of their existing products - which I should point out are 2 separate products).