Secure schema identifier generation

• US 20070050395A1
• Filed: 11/23/2005
• Published: 03/01/2007
• Est. Priority Date: 08/25/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Hunter, Jason, Nettleton, David
• Granted Patent: US 7,885,945 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 21/6236 between heterogeneous systems
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 9/0866 involving user or device identifiers, e.g. serial number, physical or biometrical information, DNA, hand-signature or measurable physical characteristics

Abstract

A system that generates a unique identifier that employs a public key of a cryptographic key pair as a contribution to a name for an attribute associated with a schema. Additionally, a hash over the relevant entity name, version, and culture can be employed to automatically produce the remaining portion of the unique identifier. The innovation can ensure that the unique identifiers used by a schema are mathematically related to a public key in a way that can not be spoofed by malicious agents. To this end, unique identifiers can be computed at installation time by combining the n-bytes of the public key (or a hash, e.g., SHA1, of the public key) with the first n-bytes of another entity-specific hash (e.g., SHA1) computed with respect to specific attributes.

Claims

1. A system that generates a set of unique identifiers for attributes associated with a schema, comprising:

an identifier generation component that yields a unique identifier; and

an attribute naming component that incorporates the unique identifier into an attribute name.

2. The system of claim 1, the unique identifier generated for a given attribute comprises:

a first portion that includes a public key of a cryptographic key pair; and

a second portion that includes a hash value of criterion associated with an attribute of the schema.

3. The system of claim 2, the first portion further comprises a hash value of the public key.

4. The system of claim 2, the schema is a library schema.

5. The system of claim 4, the criterion includes a namespace, a version and a culture value.

6. The system of claim 5, the criterion further comprises a name of the attribute.

7. The system of claim 5, the criterion further comprises a sequence of names of a plurality of disparate attributes associated with the attribute.

8. The system of claim 5, the hash value encodes the version as a string in a form major.minor.

9. The system of claim 2, the schema is a platform schema.

10. The system of claim 9, the criterion includes a namespace and a culture value.

11. The system of claim 10, the criterion further comprises a name of the attribute.

12. The system of claim 11, the criterion further comprises a sequence of names of a plurality of disparate attributes associated with the attribute.

13. The system of claim 2, the identifier is a 16 byte identifier.

14. The system of claim 13, a first 8 bytes of the 16 byte identifier includes a hash of the public key, the first 8 bytes facilitate clustering in a metadata catalog.

15. A computer-implemented method of generating unique identifiers related to a schema, comprising:

establishing a unique identifier using a cryptographic key portion and a hash of criterion associated to an element of the schema; and

installing the unique identifier into a metadata catalog table that relates the unique identifier to the schema.

16. The computer-implemented method of claim 15, the criterion includes a namespace, version for library schema and culture.

17. The computer-implemented method of claim 16, the criterion further includes a name of the element.

18. The computer-implemented method of claim 15, further comprising clustering the unique identifier with disparate unique identifiers based at least in part upon the cryptographic key portion.

19. A system that facilitates generation of a unique identifier, comprising:

means for incorporating a public key into a unique identifier of an attribute associated with a schema;

means for incorporating a hash value of at least one of a namespace, version and culture into the unique identifier; and

means for storing the unique identifier into a metadata catalog.

20. The system of claim 19, further comprising means for incorporating a hash value of an entity name into the unique identifier, the entity is at least one of a type, a property, a set and an association related to the schema.