[security-dev] Meaningful relationships

[Shane Bryzak]

I should clarify something.  It is entirely possible for a user to have 
a role in a group without being a member of that group.  One of the good 
use cases that someone from the team informed me about previously is an 
administrator for a group of doctors.  The membership scenario would 
look like this:

IdentityMembership
-------------------------
MEMBER = Bill (User)
GROUP = Doctors
ROLE = Admin

In this case, Bill (the user) would not be a member of the Doctors group 
himself, he would simply be an administrator for the group. If he were 
to be a member of the group (as well as an Administrator) then that 
would require the following additional record:

IdentityMembership
-------------------------
MEMBER = Bill (User)
GROUP = Doctors
ROLE = null

So, in a nutshell - if a Role is specified, it means the member has that 
role for the specified group, however the member is not an actual member 
of the group themselves.  Hope that makes sense!


On 15/10/12 18:19, Shane Bryzak wrote:
> No, not that kind.  I'm currently reviewing the database schema for 
> the identity management module - in the previous version of PicketLink 
> we had quite a good design [1] that was a little abstract, but met all 
> the requirements well.  Here's a summary of the key tables:
>
> IdentityObject - this table would contain both User and Group records
> IdentityObjectRelationship - models the relationship between User and 
> Group, i.e. Group memberships
> IdentityObjectRelationshipName - this table is a special one that 
> contained the names for "named relationships".  A named relationship 
> can effectively be thought of as a Role, (and was also modelled in the 
> IdentityObjectRelationship table) for example "John" (User) is a 
> "Manager" (Role, the "named" bit of the relationship) in "Head Office" 
> (Group) - see [2] for more details.
>
> With the introduction of application roles we need to jig this design 
> a little bit.  I was thinking of keeping IdentityObject essentially 
> the same, with the exception that it would also be used to contain 
> Roles, as well as Users and Groups.  Instead of the 
> IdentityObjectRelationship table though, I propose we go with the 
> following slightly less abstract design:
>
> IdentityMembership
> -------------------------
> MEMBER
> GROUP
> ROLE
>
> This basically allows us to make any IdentityType (User, Group or 
> Role) a member of a Group or Role, or both.  Here's a few scenarios:
>
> 1. John is a part of the accounting group.
>
> IdentityMembership
> -------------------------
> MEMBER = John (User)
> GROUP = accounting
> ROLE = null
>
> 2. The Manager group is a subgroup of the Employee group.
>
> IdentityMembership
> -------------------------
> MEMBER = Manager (Group)
> GROUP = Employee
> ROLE = null
>
> 3. Kevin is an administrator for the Manager group
>
> IdentityMembership
> -------------------------
> MEMBER = Kevin (User)
> GROUP = Manager
> ROLE = Admin
>
> 4. Kelly is a superuser (which is an application role)
>
> IdentityMembership
> -------------------------
> MEMBER = Kelly (User)
> GROUP = null
> ROLE = Superuser
>
> With the above examples in mind, this now leads into the "meaningful 
> relationships" theme - can anyone think of any other meaningful 
> security relationships that cannot be modelled with this design?  I'm 
> not really looking to make the design "future proof" as such, but I 
> would like to ensure we cover all currently known scenarios / use 
> cases.  Comments and feedback welcome of course.
>
>
> [1] 
> http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/picketlink/idm/downloads/docs/1.0.0.GA/ReferenceGuide/en-US/html_single/index.html#spi_model
> [2] 
> http://anonsvn.jboss.org/repos/picketlink/idm/downloads/docs/1.0.0.GA/ReferenceGuide/en-US/html_single/index.html#d0e342 
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> security-dev mailing list
> security-dev at lists.jboss.org
> https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/security-dev


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.jboss.org/pipermail/security-dev/attachments/20121015/2749053e/attachment.html