Speculative Authorizations

In a large-scale enterprise system, making authorization decisions is often computationally expensive due to the complexity of the policies involved and the large size of the resource and user populations. Given today’s trends, computing resources and network bandwidth will become more and more affordable, yet network latency will remain an obstacle. Pre-computing authorizations in advance and delivering them to the PEP cache will enable new tradeoffs between processor/network utilization and network delays. We report preliminary results of investigating what we labeled as “speculative authorizations.”