Patent ID: 7131000

Claim:
A method for providing computer application security, the method comprising: identifying secured resources within a software application; grouping secured resources into user roles stored on data stores of a plurality of security brokers, wherein grouping secured resources into user roles comprises: establishing in the data stores links to each of the secured resources; selecting the links corresponding to related secured resources; grouping the selected links into user roles; and storing the user roles in the data stores; generating a plurality of surrogate identifiers in the data stores of the security brokers, each surrogate identifier being associated with one user role; associating users with user roles, each user being associated with one user role; and determining access rights to the secured resources for each user according to a corresponding surrogate identifier without disclosing the corresponding surrogate identifier to the user, the corresponding surrogate identifier being associated with the user role of the user, determining access rights further comprising: receiving a permissions request from a workstation and routing the permissions request to one of a plurality of security providers with one of the security brokers; authenticating a computer user as a valid user with one of the security providers; and authorizing the user to access one of the secured resources with one of a plurality of security providers.