Overview

The goals of the authorization system are to:

  • Make Pulp safe as a multi-user system

  • Rely on User and Group definitions in the Django database, but allow them to come from anywhere

  • Enforce permission checks at each viewset using a policy based approach

  • Give users fine-grained control over each viewset’s policy

Architecture

Pulp’s authorization model has the following architecture:

../../../../_images/rbac_architecture.png
Request Authorization:

Each request is authorized by a drf-access-policy based policy at the viewset-level. You can learn more about defining an access policy here.

Task Permissions Check:

A permission check that occurs inside of Task code. This tends to use permission checking calls like has_perm or has_perms provided by Django.

Permission Checking Machinery:

A set of methods which can check various conditions such as if a requesting user has a given permission, or is a member of a group that has a given permission, etc. See the Permission Checking Machinery section for the complete list of available methods.

Users and Groups:

Users and Groups live in the Django database and are used by the Permission Checking Machinery. See the Users and Groups documentation for more information.

Getting Started

To add authorization for a given resource, e.g. FileRemote, you’ll need to:

Define the Policy:

  1. Define the default statements of the new Access Policy for the resource. See the Defining an Access Policy documentation for more information on that.

  2. Define the roles as sets of permissions for that resource.

  3. Define the default role associations created for new objects using the creation_hooks attribute of the new Access Policy for the resource. See the Adding Automatic Permissions for New Objects documentation for more information on that.

  4. Ship that Access Policy as the class attribute DEFAULT_ACCESS_POLICY of a NamedModelViewSet. This will contain the statements and creation_hooks attributes. Ship the roles as the LOCKED_ROLES attribute accordingly. See the Shipping a Default Access Policy documentation for more information on this.

  5. Add the RolesMixin to the viewset and add statements for managing roles to the access policy. Usually this is accompanied by adding a manage_roles permission on the model.

Enforce the Policy:

  1. pulpcore.plugin.access_policy.AccessPolicyFromDB is configured as the default permission class, so by specifying a DEFAULT_ACCESS_POLICY it will automatically be enforced. See the Viewset Enforcement docs for more information on this.

Add QuerySet Scoping:

  1. Define a queryset_filtering_required_permission attribute on your viewset that names the permissions users must have to view an object. This is possible if your viewset is a subclass of the pulpcore.plugin.models.NamedModelViewSet. See the Enabling QuerySet Scoping documentation for more information.