[keycloak-dev] user groups vs. client groups

[Bill Burke]

On 11/23/2015 9:22 AM, Adam Young wrote:
> On 11/22/2015 10:50 PM, Bill Burke wrote:
>> Most Java EE apps, simple permission stuff is handled by the
>> applications themselves.  The security layer propagates identity and
>> user/role mappings and the application decides which roles have
>> permission to access which resource.  So, Keycloak core can focus on
>> provide user/group/role/attribute authentication and information.  The
>> service Pedro is working on will offer an optional, complimentary way to
>> centrally manage permissions if you want to.  My on personal opinion is
>> that most apps will want to manage resource permissions in their own
>> special app-specific way and Pedro's stuff will be most useful as a
>> backend-service.
> So the analogue in Keystone is the Policy stuff.  Again, Keystone has
> had to weather a storm;
>
> Access Control permissions in OpenStack are done at the Python API (not
> URL) level. The code calls out to the policy API to check that the
> context of the call matches the attributes of the resource. Practically
> speaking, this means two checks:  does the role match, and does the
> scope (project or user) match.
>

We really should have a BJ session.   Basic Java EE does permission via 
URL.  Pedro's stuff will be a lot more abstract.  You would submit your 
parameters (user, group, role, resource attributes, etc.) and get back 
authorization permissions.  All through the UMA protocol.  URL is just 
one type of resource in Pedro's stuff...Pedro should answer though. 
Stian and I really only have a high level understanding of what he is doing.

>
>     It would be easier for deployers if it was URL based.  Instead, it is
> deep in the code, and the reason being that often an application needs
> to fetch an object from the database to check ownership before checking
> scope (what project owns the resource).  What we learned is that this
> can and should actually be two checks.  The role check can be done in a
> non-application specific way, and performed in the middleware stack;

We don't know shit about the Python stack.  Personally I haven't touched 
Python in 15 years.  But anything Java based we have a good pulse on. 
We've focused mostly on basic Java EE authorization.  Most of our users 
are interested in Keycloak out of the box, or customizing the federation 
and/or authentication flows.


> kinda like in the Tomcat Webserver prior to hitting the servlet itself,
> but in a python WSGI way instead.  This part could and should be
> dynamically fetched from the Keystone server.  Only the scope check
> needs to be done in a resource specific way.  There is support at the
> EJB/Hibernate layer for this kind of access control, too, and that may
> be a better place to focus on completely.  I suspect it is this kind of
> "Dynamic Policy" stuff that Pedro is working on.  Do we have docs for
> that?  I'd love to compare notes.
>
> I'm in the US, on East Coast time.  THis is a short Week due to
> Thanksgiving, but I'd love to have a video conference of some sort the
> following week to sync up the lessons learned from both projects.

Yes!  Let's figure something out.



-- 
Bill Burke
JBoss, a division of Red Hat
http://bill.burkecentral.com