I hope you're fine, this is my first question and I really don't know where to start from, so here it is,
I've been trying to build a sample with Microsoft Web api Template where I have to authorize users based on roles for example "Admin, Moderators, etc..." so, the thing is the I don't want to put all those roles on the top of the controller like
[Authorize ( Roles ="Admin, Moderators, etc...")]
I see this as not a good practice because What happens if I create another role in my db? I will have to modify the controller to add the new Role xD, really bad, isn't it? so the question is. How to extend some class like AuthorizeFilter to get the roles from database and validate with the controller? I mean if there is a user who is in the role admin authorize it and viceversa?
the other question is How to build a great authorzationfilter which can manage something like if a user if in Moderator Role but the only right he has is to user the Create action in the controller?
I hope you can help me with an example...
Thanks in advance
Ps. Sorry for my english
I agree role based authorization is somehow limited and authorize attribute is a bit rigid.
In some scenarios role based authorization is not enough, you need to extend it. You can introduce the permission concept. Instead of be a requirement that you have to be a member of a specific role to execute an action, you could state that to be authorized to execute an action you need a specific permission. So instead of authorize attribute you use RequiredPermisionAttribute. Of course you need to write RequiredPermissionAttribute as an authorization filter.
In the database you have the Permissions Table, the RolesTable, the RolePermissions table and UsersInRole table.
So a user can be a member of one or more roles. A role can have one or more permissions. A user has a specific permission if he/she is a memeber of a role that has that permission.
The required permission filter checks if the logged in user is a member of a role that has the permission, if not, then returns 401 not authorized.
This is a more flexible approach, actions are not tied to roles and roles don't have a fixed number of permissions.
Related
I'm currently working on a project where a user can have many roles, and each role has assigned one or many permissions. Permissions describe the actions that a user can apply to ressources. For example let's consider that I have three ressources that I can interact with using my API : users, books, payments.
I'd like to have all users able to update their personal informations like phone number... etc. This led me to give update permission on user's ressource for all users. But the problem is that I want them to be able to updates their own profiles only. Furthermore, some users have admin permissions and can change other users permissions, therefor they have another kind of update permission on user's resource.
So my question is : what's the best way to design the permission table. Below you can find my schema design. Thank you for your answers in advance.
User(firstName string, lastName string, roles Role[])
Role(name string, description string, permissions Permission[])
Permission(name string, effect 'Allow' | 'Deny', resource string, action string)
Well I am not entirely sure what you meant by resource and action. If you meant URI template and HTTP method, then ok. Otherwise you might need a different solution or somehow add parameters to your design if you want to allow or deny individual resources per id.
If we are talking about a REST API, which I assume, then you can do something like PATCH /api/v1/current-user/profile {...} for updating your profile and PATCH /api/v1/users/{user-id}/profile {...} to update somebody else's profile. If you meant controller classes and their methods, then you can do the same with two different controllers, something like CurrentUser.partialUpdate(params) and User.partialUpdate(params).
As of updating user permissions, I wonder how to do it, because you can update only role permissions and give or take away roles for the users in your model.
Another thing I don't understand that why do you need the allow|deny flags. If roles collide because users can have multiple roles or permissions collide, because you can both allow and deny the same thing, then how do you resolve it without a hierarchy? And if you don't have a hierarchy, then this flag is completely useless and just deny all and allow what is added to the role.
As of the one user multiple roles approach it is not a great idea, at least in places where people take security seriously a single account or at least a single session can have only a single role. Since this would make a lot of repetition I would solve this on a role level and make composite roles or support role inheritance. So for example the Administrator role would be the composite of the OwnProfileEditor and ProfileEditor sub-roles, which I would rather call Features or Capabilities or PermissionGroups rather than Roles.
Usually RBAC is not that flexible, so people tend to add per User Permissions to override Role Permissions. I would not do it, because you will end up with a mess if you follow that approach.
I have a Microsoft Teams group tab and I'd like to implement a permission system in which users can do different things in the tab depending on their role in the team (or channel). The context I get from the Teams JavaScript API cannot be trusted, so I have to check group/team/channel role through the MS Graph API.
The only way I've found to check whether a user is an owner or only a member of a team is to call /teams/{groupId}/channels/{channelId}/members. In the response I can see which roles users have and I so I can find out if the current user has owner privileges.
The problem is that this endpoint requires admin consent (I guess because it displays data of other users). I'd like to avoid having to ask for admin consent, however. Is there another way of finding out about the role of a user in a team without admin consent? (As private channels behave differently in Teams, this would be the same as finding out about the role in a channel)
I know that I can get if a user is in a group through the optional group claims that are added to the ID token but this doesn't include the rule inside the group/team/channel.
To read a user's role in a channel currently requires admin consent, the permission needed is ChannelMember.Read.All see list conversation member documentation here. Admin consent is also required to get a member of a team or list members in a team. For your particular use case, I would recommend asking your admin to grant these permissions.
We are removing User, User Group and Permission models from our backend in favor of Auth0.
Our first idea was to just delete User, Group and Permission tables from DB and replace related foreign keys with varchar field. In this field we would then enter IDs that we get from Auth0 in JWT (pointing to something not present in our DB).
Is this good approach? I somehow feel that there must be more "relational" way of doing this.
Generally OAuth will not do all of the permission checks for you. Instead it gives you general mechanisms to sign the user in and issue + validate tokens.
In most real world architectures you also need to manage a second level of authorization in your back end - using domain specific user data for roles, permissions etc.
A couple of write ups of mine may help:
User Data Management
API Authorization
Auth0 Community Manager Dan here,
In this scenario you may be able to leverage the RBAC to replace your existing users/groups/permissions setup.
You would register a user's roles and the associated permissions of each role in the Auth0 dashboard or programmatically via the management API. Then you can setup a rule to add user roles to the token.
To connect this user to your existing user data store you can store the Auth0 id, similarly to how you have described.
This allows you to lookup the user when the token is received, and to associate any permissions or roles the user has. You can make roles API-specific by adding a prefix to the role, or have roles be general depending on your needs.
I am new to the framework cakephp and I am using the Authentication component as well as the ACL. I have followed this tutorial: http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/tutorials-and-examples/simple-acl-controlled-application/simple-acl-controlled-application.html to get me started.
How do I give a not logged in User a role (group) ACL such as 'Guest'?
Should I even consider giving a not logged in user such a role (group) ACL? I mean would it bring any disadvantages?
Usually you would not give a role to a user that is not logged in, because the user would not have a record in the user table therefore the User could not belongTo a Role. If you wanted to do alot of special programming I guess you could do it, but I don't see a point.
Most people just allow non-authenticated and authenticated users access to various parts of there app with the $this->Auth->allow() parameter in the controller. Then they section off other parts of the application to allow certain authenticated Users belonging to certain Roles to access with ACL.
http://book.cakephp.org/2.0/en/core-libraries/components/authentication.html#making-actions-public
I am using Acl in new web app.
in my app there are four groups of users.
I have given $this->Auth->authorize = 'actions' so that it will check the permission for actions automatically.
my problem is some of the actions such as change Password,edit profile,etc...
are common to all users.
But now i need to create each record for the permission of each users in acos_aros table.
this is too annoying
1) Is there any way to give permission to all types of users with a single allow statement?
2) Is there any way to allow and deny user by checking whether parameter is passed or not?
that means i need to give permission to pass parameter to an action for a specific user. If any other user pass the parameter and try to access the data i need to deny them.
whether row level access control can be done with ACL?
Any help will be appreciated.
Thankz in advance :)
If you put a $this->Auth->allow('action1','action2'...) into your beforeFilter() of the controller, access is granted to all users. If you need an ACL-only solution, you have to create a parent aco to which all other acos you want to allow are children. Then grant your users the rights on the parent.
The ACL plugin from the bakery could come in handy, if you already have your ACL tree structure.
For building the ACL tree structure the build_acl() script in the tutorial at the end of the cake-manual is useful.
Allowing to pass the parameter for all users and checking their role in the action is not an option?
the solution for the 2nd problem is here
but this is not implemented using ACL :(