[keycloak-dev] roles vs. groups

[Stan Silvert]

First, +1 to adding groups and permissions, because that's what our 
users expect to see.

I'm going to go ahead and say what I was hoping to say last night.  It's 
hard to visualize this stuff without seeing diagrams, but I'm wondering 
if we still need composites.  That is, once we have groups, roles, and 
permissions, do composites really solve something that can't be done as 
easily or better with the groups, roles, and permissions?

Composites have been a point of confusion.  I can remember when I first 
started working with Keycloak that it took awhile to get comfortable 
with composites.  I think that's the reaction our users are having as 
well.  From a technical standpoint, they are very powerful.  But that's 
not readily apparent to a lot of people, which is why users are always 
asking for groups.  Perhaps we should give up some technical elegance 
for something that's easier to understand.

If composites are only there for convenience, I'd say get rid of them.  
IMO, we should favor something that's easy to understand and still gets 
the job done.  (As a bonus, simpler data structures are easier to deal 
with as we add new features!)

On 11/4/2015 7:46 AM, Pedro Igor Silva wrote:
>> Let's supose, you have a group called "GroupA", that group have roles
>> "Create invoice" this has 13 permisions, "Remove invoice" this has 5
>> permisions, "Update invoice" this has 19 permisions...
>>
>> I asign 25 users to Group A, but 2 users, should not have 3 permisions
>> that are different in both users, should I need to create "GroupB" and
>> "GroupC" with the exact permissions, just to handle this 3 permisions
>> exclusions?
>>
>> It probably can be a little overkill, but IHMO is more flexible than
>> an all or nothing approach.
>>
> I see your point. However, IMO, when you start to use negatives you may end up with something more complicate and hard to follow.
>
> What I meant by positive logic is not an all or nothing approach, but use positives permissions and play with them to match your requirements.
>
> For instance, we are developing some additional authorization features to Keycloak. There you can define a set of policies that rule access to your resources based on different type of access control mechanisms: rbac, contextual/risk-based, abac, user-based, etc.
>
> Policies can be applied to a resource type, resource instance, a specific scope (eg.: create, remove, delete, etc) or a combination of them. Policies are also independent of each other and can be reused and combined in different ways to actually define and enforce authorization for a given resource/scope.
>
> Considering you scenario, you would have something like that:
>
>      - Only Group A Policy (defines that all members of Group A can *do something*)
>      - Resource X Policy (here we are telling what Group A can do. In this case, access Resource X and any of its scopes)
>        - Applies Only Group A Policy
>
> You can also have something like:
>
>      - Only Group A Policy (defines that all members of Group A can *do something*)
>      - Create Invoice Policy (here we're telling that Group A can access a specific scope.)
>        - Applies Only Group A Policy
>
> Now, if you want specific policies for some of your users, you can do something like:
>
>      - Exceptional Y Policy (which can define a specific user, role, group, any contextual information like current time or authentication method)
>      - Create Invoice Policy
>        - Applies Only Group A Policy
>        - Applies Exceptional Y Policy
>
> That will provide flexible policies, make them more meaningful and easy to follow/understand. We are considering protect resources as important assets within an organization, which should be ruled by a set of policies that must be applied before accessing them.
>
> I would appreciate if you could provide some more info about your use case. Right now I'm writing some examples and would be nice to check how your requirements can be addressed (or not :)) with what we did so far.
>
> Thanks.
> Pedro Igor
>
>
>        
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