[keycloak-user] Data filtering in SQL

Thu Nov 8 07:42:11 EST 2018

Hi Dmitry,

Agree with you when you mention application vs data security. I also agree
that Keycloak can also solve data security problems.

Privacy is one of the main reasons behind our UMA support a very important
aspect of data security. In addition to privacy, we also added extensions
to UMA and OAuth2 standards to enable applications to use Keycloak as a
Policy Decision Point, mainly target for application security.

As PDP (and PAP), Keycloak allows you to govern access to protected
resources and to obtain authorization decisions as a result of the
evaluation of policies associated with these resources. Being based on UMA
and OAuth2 we support token-based authorization but also access control
based on the permissions granted by the server. So, yeah, it should be
possible to filter data based on those permissions as well dynamically
create WHERE clauses.

My main concerns about data security are scalability and manageability, two
aspects that are closely related to how much fine-grained you want to be.
Like I said, in Keycloak you can protect a set of one or more resources as
well as scope specific permissions, which can span access decisions for one
or more resources.

We are using data security when you enable permissions to users or groups,
where results are filtered based on the evaluation of these permissions.
Performance wise, evaluation is quite satisfactory, being the main
challenges the trade-off between usability vs performance. Recently we had
important changes to improve the performance of our token endpoint and
policy evaluation engine and I think we can perform well when fetching
permissions from the server for a set of one or more resources.

I'm happy to discuss how we can leverage what we have for data security if
the community is interested.

Regards.
Pedro Igor

On Wed, Nov 7, 2018 at 8:47 PM Dmitry Telegin <dt at acutus.pro> wrote:

> Hi Rob,
>
> On Tue, 2018-11-06 at 16:28 +0000, Byrd, Rob M wrote:
> > (Hope this is the correct way to reply - let me know if not)
> >
> > Thanks.  So my concern is really with the whole idea that an Enterprise
> Application's security constraints could really be all implemented based on
> url-patterns, is that what you guys are thinking?
>
> Cannot speak for Keycloak guys, but will put in my 2¢ as an architect -
> URL-based (or rather resource-based) authorization covers only one aspect
> of the application security. Data filtering is equally important, but it's
> just another facet of the problem, and needs to be solved accordingly.
> Indeed, Keycloak doesn't provide OOTB any means for automatically limiting
> subsets of data shown to the user, as Keycloak has a completely different
> scope (namely Web SSO/IDM solution).
>
> However, you can still use Keycloak as a central warehouse for your
> security (meta)data, and use it the way you want. Like I said before,
> nothing stops you from defining some policies in Keycloak, then retrieving
> them and converting to a WHERE clause for your SQL/JPQL/NoSQL query.
>
> Speaking of NoSQL - this might be not directly relevant to your problem,
> but still interesting. A similar problem has surfaced in the discussion
> following my talk on Apache Sling + Keycloak [1] earlier this year; the
> central point was: "okay, we can have Keycloak path-based authorization in
> Sling, but how do we limit the content visible to the user?"
> That time we came up with some sort of hybrid solution, like path-based
> security + JCR ACLs and/or application-level rules; but now I think this
> might be something similar, like generating JCR's equivalent to the WHERE
> clause based on Keycloak policy definition.
>
> Just to make sure I understand the case, let's imagine:
> - there are users and groups (live in Keycloak);
> - there are, say, "projects" (live in business tier + DB);
> - there is a policy in Keycloak saying "projects should be accessible only
> to the members of the respective groups";
> - based on that:
>  - GET /projects/<project> should return 200 + representation if the user
> is a member of the group, 403 otherwise;
>  - GET /projects should return the list of projects the current user has
> access to.
>
> Is this correct?
>
> [1]
> https://adapt.to/2018/en/schedule/modern-authentication-in-sling-with-openid-connect-and-keycloak.html
>
> Cheers,
> Dmitry Telegin
> CTO, Acutus s.r.o.
> Keycloak Consulting and Training
>
> Pod lipami street 339/52, 130 00 Prague 3, Czech Republic
> +42 (022) 888-30-71
> E-mail: info at acutus.pro
>
> >
> > For example, mostly a user can visit most features (urls) in an
> application, but it is the subset of things they can see/do within the
> feature that is the crux of the security issue - and it does not seem
> feasible to architect urls in such a way that they can be used as the key
> to security.  Thoughts?
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > Rob Byrd
> > DST
> > Solutions Lead
> > SS&C Technologies Inc.   |   1055 Broadway, Kansas City, MO 64105
> > t: (816) 435-7286  | m (816) 509-0119
> > rmbyrd at dstsystems.com  |  www.ssctech.com
> > Follow us:  |   |
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Dmitry Telegin [mailto:dt at acutus.pro]
> > Sent: Friday, November 2, 2018 12:22 AM
> > > To: Byrd, Rob M <rmbyrd at dstsystems.com>; keycloak-user at lists.jboss.org
> > Subject: Re: [keycloak-user] Data filtering in SQL
> >
> > Hello Rob,
> >
> > If I get it right, it's all about generating SQL WHERE clause from
> Keycloak policies? I think this is doable, as Keycloak has a well-defined
> object model for authorization policies, and it's easy to obtain policy
> definitions in JSON format. I think Pedro Igor will tell you more about
> that.
> >
> > You should pay attention to the following:
> > - there are differences in semantics between OPA and Keycloak policies.
> For example, Keycloak policies do not operate HTTP methods but rather use
> more generic notion of scopes;
> > - not every policy type can be easily converted to a WHERE clause. It
> should be trivial for User/Group/Role policies, but is virtually impossible
> for Script and Rules, as they are just blackboxes that evaluate to true or
> false. Unless of course your DBMS has a built-in JavaScript engine :)
> >
> > Good luck!
> > Dmitry Telegin
> > CTO, Acutus s.r.o.
> > Keycloak Consulting and Training
> >
> > Pod lipami street 339/52, 130 00 Prague 3, Czech Republic
> > +42 (022) 888-30-71
> > E-mail: info at acutus.pro
> >
> > On Thu, 2018-11-01 at 21:39 +0000, Byrd, Rob M wrote:
> > > I am comparing OPA authorization to Keycloak - how could I enforce
> Keycloak policy in the SQL closest to the data for good performance,
> including returning subsets of lists?  OPA discusses this at
> https://blog.openpolicyagent.org/write-policy-in-opa-enforce-policy-in-sql-d9d24db93bf4
> .
> > >
> > > Thanks!
> > >
> > > Rob Byrd
> > > DST
> > > Solutions Lead
> > > SS&C Technologies Inc.   |   1055 Broadway, Kansas City, MO 64105
> > > t: (816) 435-7286  | m (816) 509-0119
> > > rmbyrd at dstsystems.com<mailto:rmbyrd at dstsystems.com>  |
> www.ssctech.com<http://www.ssctech.com/>;;
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> > >
> > >
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