Hi Naama,
I like the idea of making Access Control hierarchical.
I came up with some questions I thought we might think about:
1. Do the tenants become the equivalent of the "groups" we are using today?
2. In your example, can there be children of 'Company C'?
3. Some of the APIs currently allow for 'token' authentication but, the
UI portion was never implemented (AFAIK). I would like to see the
'token' authentication added so that scripts don't have to be run with
user/pass.
4. I would like to see more than a single "root" user (perhaps a group
that one could assign users).
Thanks,
Hank
On 02/21/2017 03:32 PM, Naama Shoresh wrote:
Hi,
We've been considering the subject of authorization within TO, and have
phrased a concept we'd like to share and get some feedback about.
You can find it in the wiki
<https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=68715910>,
and also written below, for ease of use.
Your comments and insights are most welcome.
=========================================================
The access control model concept is constructed of two dimensions:
capabilities & data.
1. CapabilitiesCheck if a user is allowed to perform an operation
APIs are grouped to roles, and each user is assigned a set of roles which
implies his allowed APIs.
Example:
API | Role
-----------------------------+-----------------
GET /ds/:id | ds-read
POST /ds/create | ds-write
POST /ds/:id/update | ds-write
POST /profile/:id/update | profile-write
The access is checked at the entry point. A user Joe which has the roles
ds-read & ds-write is allowed to operate the following APIs: /ds/:id,
/ds/create and /ds/:id/update.
2. DataCheck if a user is allowed to access a specific set of data.
Here is where the concept of *tenants* is introduced:
Every "resource" in the database is assigned (delivery-services, servers,
etc..) to a tenant. A tenant is an organization in TC. It can be either a
content-provider or an ISP. Tenants are hierarchical, where the parent is
conceptually assigned a super-set of all the resources of its children.
Each user belongs to one or more tenants. Only the tenant's resources are
available for the tenant's users.
* Note: for simplicitly, the example below refers to a single tenant per
user.
Example:
Tenant table:
ID | Tenant-name | Parent-ID
----+-------------+-----------
1 | company A | -
2 | company B | 1 // a child of company A
3 | company C | 1 // another child of company A
4 | company D | -
5 | company E | -
DS table:
DS-Name | ... | Tenant
---------------------+--------
cp-a-vod | ... | 1
cp-a-linear | ... | 1
cp-b-vod | ... | 2
cp-e-linear | ... | 4
Users table:
Username | ... | Tenant
-----------+-----+--------
Joe | ... | 1
Jack | ... | 2
John | ... | 4
The user Joe will be allowed to access DSs of company A, company B &
company C, namely: cp-1-vod, cp-a-linear & cp-b-vod.
The user Jack will be allowed to access DS of company B, namely: cp-b-vod.
The user John will be allowed to access DS of company D, namely:
cp-e-linear.
Note: There will be a special "root" user that will be allowed to access
all resources.
Access Control Serice
The authorization (access-control) functionality is contained within a new
service(s). The first APIs this service will expose are something along
these lines:
1. Check if a user is allowed to perform an operation.
Input: A user and an API route
Output: A boolean answer allowed/rejected
2. Check if a user is allowed to access a resource of a certain tenant
Input: A user and a tenant
Output: A boolean answer allowed/rejected
This is a simplified description. It doesn't handle the issue of
interaction between tenants, such as assigning a delivery-service to a CDN,
which will be discussed separately.
This email only aims to present the concepts.
Thanks,
Naama
