We have to authorize hundreds of users for a cube, and the users must be restricted to individual dimension members. Two dimensions are relevant for the permissioning, a datatype permission (with only 10 members) and a customer dimension (with 2000+ members).
Since one user can be permissioned for any number of datatypes and customers, we could build one role per datatype and one role per customer... ending up with 2010+ roles. The datatype roles are not authorized for any customers and vice versa, therefore we could enable users for any combination of datatypes and customers.
On the other hand, if we create one role per user, we end up with only hundreds of roles. I therefore do not see the benefit of roles in our scenario. We will probably use AMO to maintain the roles.
My question is, if there is a penalty when using one role per user or it this is a tested method. Of course I am also interested in any alternative approach.
Problem in this case is that you don't have any data that would help you automate the roles.
So in order to make use of suggestions by mmarie you will need to further develop your cube and to maintain the user-customer relationship somehow (more horrible admin work).
Technically your scenario seems simple enough to be handled by http://easyroles.com which was made specifically to help out in these situations.
Disclaimer: I am involved with eR tool, but there is no other way I can answer this question since there are no other tools that are made for this.
Related
I have a web-application secured with Keycloak. To keep the description of the service short, we have Users and Documents as entities in the service. The users may have access to none or more documents and may edit or read the document.
Currently we have roles such as Admin, EndUser, Developer etc. We then keep a database table outside of Keycloak that maps the documents to users and what user has what access level to what document. All our end-users have the EndUser role in Keycloak. Every single time an EndUser tries to read/edit a Document, we have to make a lookup in the database table for authorization.
We would like to migrate that table to Keycloak. As I understand it I basically have two options:
Create a lot of roles, two for each document with names such as doc_read_[DOCUMENT-ID] and doc_edit_[DOCUMENT-ID] and so on. Then assign the correct role to the correct user. The downside here is that the number of roles will grow A LOT. Also, the number of roles attached to a user will be very large.
Create a group for each document, with the name of the document id. Have different sub-groups for read/write and then add the users in the correct groups. The downside is that the number of groups will be very large. Also, I will rely Authorization on group names, so the list of group names has to be mapped to the token.
I do not want to add a user-attribute with the document-ids to each user. With this approach I can not get an overview of a document and see what users have access to a given Document.
What is the best practice here? Are there any other solutions to solve this issue? This must be a very common setup.
This is just my opinion.
From what I understand both solutions are suboptimal, adding a role per document is unnatural and too finer grain. And as you already mention this would lead to too many roles that probably you will have to add them into the token.
I would personally use Keycloak just for the authentication part and do the authorization part in the backend. I would also try to group the documents in a way that reflect which user roles are allowed to manipulate them.
Alternatively you might try to use Keycloak's Authorization features to handle that use-case, however I have never used it, so there is not much that I can say about this option.
In my opinion what you want to achieve is something that is very tied to your business logic, I wouldn't recomend depending on keycloak to do it. Your token would constantly grow and management would be a nightmare really.
I see no problem in having a service with good cache to lookup permissions, the bulk of the data won't change much over time.
My team and I are handling hundreds of subscriptions that are belonging to different teams.
Many of them have different needs in terms of security, services to be used, etc whereas we, as a central platform, also make sure that everyone work with the same baseline (security, monitoring, automation, etc.).
We of course have a need to handle RBAC and we are using custom roles a lot. I was wondering if there was a way to create a custom role based on another one to benefit from "classic inheritance".
So I could create for example a role named "basic_user" that would contains a set of "Actions" and an "advanced_user" could have "basic_user" accesses plus additional ones, and so on with "super_advanced_user".
I know that Microsoft has designed it the opposite way so far, allowing us to assign multiple roles to a given individual/group, but for internal design reasons, we would like to stick to one role assignment for a given recipient (one AAD group containing all people accordingly to their role).
Is this something technically feasible/reproducible or does anyone heard about such a feature ? Or maybe is it something we should not consider because of some reasons you'd want to highlight ?
The feature that you would like to implement as you described is not currently not available as you were already aware of this. But however you can post about this feature directly via this link. It will reviewed directly by the Microsoft engineering teams and will respond.
I'm creating a micro services for example one for user management i.e (roles, credentials, rights, menus etc) related and one for bank account-details, now i have a scenario to getting user roles detail and rights detail from db, is it a good practice to repeat columns of database user management db i.e.(roles, rights) in bank-account db as per requirement or duplicate data in bank-account db ?
Or no need to duplicate data in bank-account db and send a separate call to get user data first from user management db ?
please suggest a best possibility
Waqas,
You're in microservices environment. There is a well-known Domain Driven Design (DDD) with one of a key pattern of Bounded Contexts. That means you should try to avoid mixing the contexts and duplicate the user information in bank-account db (it might be inevitable some time, but I suppose not in your case).
Therefore, it's fine that you have to call user management service in order to gain the required information about your users.
I agree with #Stepan Tsybulski. Also, I suggest you reduce the need for a bounded context to depend on the other to the minimum possible. So, duplication of data is the best option here. However, you do not have to have roles and rights in the Bank Account context / DB. I'd put in the Bank Account context only what's necessary in that context: User details (such as names, birthdates, etc.) + user id.
You get the roles and rights from the session. You manage roles in the User Management context only. It's good for security and consistency, plus it's the reason for using Contexts.
There are many ways to approach a problem, but that's how I'm doing it.
In the systems, there may be data that is restricted in nature.
Sometimes access to specific entities should be easily restricted or granted based on user or group membership.
What is the best way to implement this in the microservice architecture?
#1
Should access control, managing permissions etc. be the responsibility of the microserive itself? Developers will have to implement access control, store, and update permissions for every service. Seems like not very robust and error-prone approach.
#2
Create dedicated microservice handling permission management? This service will be called by other microserives to check access permissions for each entity and filtering entities before returning results. Centralized permissions storage and management is an advantage but microservice will have to make a call to "Permission Service" for each entity to check access rights what may have a negative influence on performance. And developers still have to integrate access checks into their services what leaves space for an error.
#3
Make access control responsibility of the API Gateway or Service Mesh. It is possible to think of an implementation that will automatically filter responses of all services. But in the case when the microservice returns list of entities permissions should be checked for each entity. Still a potential performance problem.
Example
Consider the following synthetic example.
Healthcare system dealing with test results, X-Ray images etc. Health information is very sensitive and should not be disclosed.
Test results should be available only to:
patient
doctor
laboratory
Attending doctor may send the patient to another specialist. A new doctor should have access to test results too. So access can be granted dynamically.
So each entity (e.g. test results, X-Ray image) has a set of rules what users and groups are allowed to access it.
Imagine there is a microservice called "Test Results Service" dealing with test results. Should it be responsible for access control, manage permissions etc.? Or permissions management should be extracted to separate microservice?
Healthcare system may also handle visits to a doctor. Information about patient's visit to the doctor should be available to:
patient
doctor
clinic receptionist
This is the example of a different entity type that requires entity level access restriction based on user or group membership.
It is easy to imagine even more examples when entity level access control is required.
I came to the following generic solution.
ACL security model is used. Each object in the system has associated set of permissions. Permissions defines who and what actions can perform on the object.
Microservices are responsible for entity-level authorization and filter objects in responses based on permissions of the objects.
Central Access Control Service is responsible for the creation, update, and deletion of permissions for all objects in the system. Access Control Service database is the primary store of objects' permissions.
Permissions stored in microservices databases are synchronized with Access Control Service database using event-carried state transfer. Every time, permissions are changed an event is sent to the message broker. Microservices can subscribe to these events to synchronize permissions.
API Gateway can be used as the additional protection layer. API Gateway can call Access Control Service directly (RPC) to check response objects' permissions or load recently revoked permissions.
Design features:
A way to uniquely identify each object in the system is required (e.g. UUID).
Permissions synchronization in microservices are eventual consistent. In case of partitioning between message broker and microservice permissions will not be synchronized. It may be a problem with revocation of the permissions. The solution to this problem is a separate topic.
Looks like security is a part of business logic here. In both examples.
Then security could be a part of data scheme.
For example,
Patient can see his tests:
select * from test_result where patient_id=*patient_id*
Doctor can see all test from his medical department:
select * from test_result where branch_id=*doctor_branch*
I believe that to have separate MS for access control is a really bad idea and could lead serious performance problems. Just imagine situation that somebody with zero entity access tries to fetch all entities each time :) You will always need to handle larger result sets than actually needed.
Firstly, this is very bad idea to have a separate (per microservice) security model. It should be single always cross-cutting all application, because it can lead to a hell with access management, permissions granting and mapping between entities in different microservices.
In second, I assume that you are wrong with understanding how to organize microservices..? You should dedicate the principle of splitting functionality into microservices: by features, by domain, etc. Look at Single Responsibility, DDD and other approaches which helps you to achieve clear behavior of your MS.
So, in best case, you should have to:
Choose right security model ABAC or RBAC - there are a lot of other options, but looking at your example I guess the ABAC is the best one
Create separate MS for access management - the main responsibility of this MS is a CRUD and assignment of groups/roles/permissions/attributes to the people accounts.
Create separate MS for providing only permitted health information.
In third, how it works?:
With ABAC you can setup hierarchical roles/permissions (based on groups/attributes) - it helps you to resolve a delegation path of who is permitted to the data
Setup authorization (via auth-MS) and store the list of permissions (in session, cookies, etc)
Check access for a given user for a needed data in health-info-MS. Here we have several options how to do this:
If you use memory-grids (hazelcast, coherence), you can easily create filters with predicates based on security attributes.
If you're using SQL (hibernate, plain SQL, etc.) you should generate queries to return only permitted data - add security specific criteria to the where clause
Few more details about SQL queries with security check in where: before the SQL execution (if hibernate & spring is easy to do with spring-method-auth hook) you should resolve all permissions assigned to a user - you can do this with call to auth-MS.
Example
We created CRUD permissions for TestResult entity - VIEW, EDIT, DELETE.
The role DOCTOR can see any TestResults - so, it has VIEW permission
The role PATIENT can see only his/her TestResults
So, you create a business rules which provide the correct where clause for each business role (DOCTOR, PATIENT, LAB, etc.) and at the end the SQL request would be like:
For patient who has assigned VIEW permission:
select * from test_result where id=*patient_id* and 1=1
For patient who hasn't assigned VIEW permission:
select * from test_result where id=*patient_id* and 1!=1
NOTE: In business rules we can add 1=1 or 1!=1 to permit/restrict query result
We have a Salesforce app where we have some custom objects and want to expose the various custom object rcords to customers.
We need to ensure that customers can see only the records belonging to their Account. Because of the way these records are setup(owned by various system users at different levels of processing), we cannot use owner based sharing...and cannot use criteria based sharing since its not dynamic(I cant use criteria based sharing to say "Share this record with all customer portal users who belong to the same Account as the record" at runtime).
So I know I have to use Apex based sharing. I have read up on the sharing objects and the sharing table. But how would I approach this.
I can write a trigger which upon inserting will create a share object and get all userids who belong to the customer portal group and whose account equals the account of the record and associate them with the share object of the record.
But I feel this is overkill correct? Lets say there are 5 users from one of our customers and lets say there are 500 records created a day...that means 2500 share objects a day just for 1 customer...for 10 customers this can go upto 25000...and scale in this way...
Am I right here?
Another problem would be if a new person joined that customer team..unless another process updates the sharing on older records, he/she cannot see the older records.
So is there a better/elegant way to do this? I thought of adding a share object to the group...but there is just one group "Customer portal group" and how do I associate the group with the account of the users?
I will appreciate any thoughts about this.
You should take a look at high-volume customer portal users. They're much cheaper relative to standard customer portal users and should meet your needs. Unlike regular users they have a totally different sharing concept. In a nutshell if they own an object they can see, if not they can't. You can then extend this based on whether a contact or account lookup on the object matches the logged in user.
Read up on this documentation:
License Types (scan to High Volume Customer Portal)
Granting High-Volume Portal Users Access to Records (login required)
You can use groups for sharing to avoid creating so many sharing records. You would have one group per account and one sharing record per account. Instead of managing thousands of sharing records you would have to manage hundreds of groups.
I haven't tried this approach with this many groups, but I read some time ago that it should work (someone posted using a LOT of groups for sharing). If you do try this, please tell us if it worked OK.