awx/docs/rbac.md

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

This document describes the RBAC implementation of the Ansible Tower Software. The intended audience of this document is the Ansible Tower developer.

Overview

The RBAC system allows you to create and layer roles for controlling access to resources. Any django Model can be made into a Resource in the RBAC system by using the ResourceMixin. Once a model is accessible as a resource you can extend the model definition to have specific roles using the ImplicitRoleField. This role field allows you to configure the name of a role, any parents a role may have, and the permissions having this role will grant you to the resource.

Roles

Roles are defined for a resource. If a role has any parents, these parents will be considered when determing what roles are checked when accessing a resource.

ResourceA
 |-- AdminRole

ResourceB
 | -- AdminRole
       |-- parent = ResourceA.AdminRole

When a user attempts to access ResourceB we will check for their access using the set of all unique roles, include the parents.

set: ResourceA.AdminRole, ResourceB.AdminRole

This would provide anyone with the above roles access to ResourceB.

Models

The RBAC system defines a few new models. These models represent the underlying RBAC implemnentation and generally will be abstracted away from your daily development tasks by the implicit fields and mixins.

Role

Resource

RoleHierarchy

RolePermission

Fields

ImplicitRoleField

ImplicitRoleField role fields are defined on your model. They provide the definition of grantable roles for accessing your Resource. Configuring the role is done using some keyword arguments that are provided during declaration.

resource_field is the name of the field in your model that is a ForeignKey to a Resource. If you use the 'ResourceMixin', this field is added to your model for you and is called resource. This field is required for the RBAC implementation to integrate any of the role fields you declare for your model. If you did not use the ResourceMixin and you have manually added a Resource link to your model you will need to set this field accordingly.

parent_role is the link to any parent roles you want considered when a user is requesting access to your Resource. A parent_role can be declared as a single string, parent.readonly, or a list of many roles, ['parentA.readonly', 'parentB.readonly']. It is important to note that a user does not need a parent role to access a resource if granted the role for that resource explicitly. Also a user will not have access to any parent resources by being granted a role for a child resource. We demonstrate this in the Usage section of this document.

role_name is the display name of the role. This is useful when generating reports or looking the results of queries.

permissions is a dictionary of set permissions that a user with this role will gain to your Resource. A permission defaults to False if not explicitly provided. Below is a list of available permissions. The special permission all is a shortcut for generating a dict with all of the explicit permissions listed below set to True.

    # Available Permissions
    {
        'create':True,
        'read':True,
        'write':True,
        'update':True,
        'delete':True,
        'scm_update':True,
        'use':True,
        'execute':True,
    }
    # Special Permissions
    {'all':True}
    # Example: readonly
    {'read':True}

ImplicitResourceField

Mixins

ResourceMixin

By mixing in the ResourceMixin to your model, you are turning your model in to a Resource in the eyes of the RBAC implementation. What this means simply is that your model will now have an ImplicitResourceField named resource. Your model will also gain some methods that aid in the checking the access a users roles provides them to a resource.

accessible_objects(cls, user, permissions)

accessible_objects is a class method to use instead of Model.objects. This method will restrict the query of objects to only the objects that a user has the passed in permissions for. This is useful when you want to only filter and display a Resource that a users role grants them the permissions to. Note that any permission fields that are left blank will default to False. accessible_objects will only filter out resources where the expected permission was True but was returned as False.

    objects = Model.accessible_objects(user, {'write':True})
    objects.filter(name__istartswith='december')

get_permissions(self, user)

get_permissions is an instance method that will give you the permission dictionary for a given user. This permission dictionary will take in to account any parent roles the user is apart of.

    >>> instance.get_permissions(admin)
    {'create':True, 'read':True, 'write':True, 'update':True,
     'delete':True, 'scm_update':True, 'execute':True, 'use':True}

accessible_by(self, user, permissions)

accessible_by is an instance method that wraps the get_permissions method. Given a user and a dictionary of permissions this method will return True or False if a users roles give them a set of permissions that match the provided permissions dict. Not that any permission fields left blank will default to False. accessible_by will only return False in a case where the passed in permission is expected to be True but was returned as False.

    >>> instance.accessible_by(admin, {'use':True, 'read':True})
    True

Usage

After exploring the Overview the usage of the RBAC implementation in your code should feel unobtrusive and natural.

    # make your model a Resource
    class Document(Model, ResourceMixin):
       ...
    # declare your new role
    readonly_role = ImplicitRoleField(
        role_name="readonly",
        resource_field="resource",
        permissions={'read':True},
    )

Now that your model is a Resource and has a Role defined, you can begin to access the helper methods provided to you by the ResourceMixin for checking a users access to your resource. Here is the output of a Python REPL session.

    # we've created some documents and a user
    >>> document = Document.objects.filter(pk=1)
    >>> user = User.objects.first()
    >>> document.accessible_by(user, {'read': True})
    False  # not accessible by default
    >>> document.readonly_role.memebers.add(user)
    >>> document.accessible_by(user, {'read':True})
    True   # now it is accessible
    >>> document.accessible_by(user, {'read':True, 'write':True})
    False  # my role does not have write permission