In secure networks, the authentication process, which verifies a user's identity, is a sensitive operation. Balancing the authentication process's security and usability while keeping operating costs low is a major challenge. We investigate this process in a secure system that has multiple authentication methods available. The goal is to find a fast and easy-to-implement approach to assign incoming requests to authentication methods in a way that balances cost, usability, and security. We model the system as a continuous-time, infinite-horizon Markov Decision Process. Then, we propose a new, fast heuristic approach to solve the problem, as the curse of dimensionality limits the effectiveness of exact methods. The proposed heuristic uses closed-form approximations to define threshold policies that are easily implementable. Numerical experiments show that our approach yields robust, near-optimal solutions, with high accuracy, for a wide range of problem instances.

中文翻译：

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控制复杂认证系统的快速启发式方法

在安全网络中，验证用户身份的身份验证过程是一项敏感操作。在保持低运营成本的同时平衡身份验证过程的安全性和可用性是一项重大挑战。我们在具有多种身份验证方法的安全系统中调查此过程。目标是找到一种快速且易于实施的方法，以平衡成本、可用性和安全性的方式将传入请求分配给身份验证方法。我们将系统建模为连续时间、无限范围的马尔可夫决策过程。然后，我们提出了一种新的、快速的启发式方法来解决这个问题，因为维数灾难限制了精确方法的有效性。提议的启发式方法使用封闭形式的近似值来定义易于实现的阈值策略。