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Managing Access with “Closed User Groups” (CUG)

General

The oak-authorization-cug module provides an alternative authorization model intended to limit read access to certain paths for a selected, small set of Principals.

These restricted areas called CUG are marked by a dedicated policy type and effectively prevent read-access for anybody not explicitly allowed.

This implies that the CUG-authorization model solely evaluates and enforces read access to regular nodes and properties. Therefore it may only be used as an additional, complementary authorization scheme while the primary module(s) is/are in charge of enforcing the complete set of permissions including read/write access, repository operations and any kind of special permissions like reading and writing access control content. See section Combining Multiple Authorization Models for information aggregating access control management and permission evaluation from different implementations.

By default the oak-authorization-cug model is disabled and it requires manual configuration steps in order to plug it into the Oak security setup.

Once deployed this authorization configuration can be used in the following two operation modes:

  1. Evaluation disabled: Access control management is supported and policies may be applied to the repository without taking effect.
  2. Evaluation enabled: All policies edited and applied by this module will take effect upon being persisted, i.e. access to items located in a restricted are will be subject to the permission evaluation associated with the authorization model.

Jackrabbit API

The Jackrabbit API defines an extension of the JCR AccessControlPolicy interface intended to grant the ability to perform certain actions to a set of Principals:

  • PrincipalSetPolicy

See Jackrabbit API for details and the methods exposed by the interface.

API Extensions

The module comes with the following extension in the org.apache.jackrabbit.oak.spi.security.authorization.cug package space:

CugPolicy

The CugPolicy interface extends the PrincipalSetPolicy and JackrabbitAccessControlPolicy interfaces provided by Jackrabbit API. It comes with the following set of methods that allow to read and modify the set of Principals that will be allowed to access the restricted area defined by a given policy instance.

CugPolicy extends PrincipalSetPolicy, JackrabbitAccessControlPolicy
   
   Set<Principal> getPrincipals();       
   boolean addPrincipals(@Nonnull Principal... principals) throws AccessControlException;       
   boolean removePrincipals(@Nonnull Principal... principals) throws AccessControlException;
CugExclude

The CugExclude allows to customize the set of principals excluded from evaluation of the restricted areas. These principals will consequently never be prevented from accessing any of the configured CUGs and read permission evaluation is delegated to any other module present in the setup.

The feature ships with two implementations out of the box:

  • CugExclude.Default: Default implementation that excludes admin, system and system-user principals. It will be used as fallback if no other implementation is configured.
  • CugExcludeImpl: OSGi service extending from the default that additionally allows to excluded principals by their names at runtime.

See also section Pluggability below.

Implementation Details

Access Control Management

The access control management part of the CUG authorization models follows the requirements defined by JSR 283 and the extensions defined by Jackrabbit API (see section Access Control Management with the following characterstics:

Supported Privileges

This implemenation of the JackrabbitAccessControlManager only supports a subset of privileges, namely jcr:read, rep:readProperties, rep:readNodes.

Access Control Policies

Only a single type of access control policies (CugPolicy) is exposed and accepted by the access control manager. Once effective each CUG policy creates a restricted area starting at the target node and inherited to the complete subtree defined therein.

Depending on the value of the mandatory PARAM_CUG_SUPPORTED_PATHS configuration option creation (and evaluation) of CUG policies can be limited to certain paths within the repository. Within these supported paths CUGs can be nested. Note however, that the principal set defined with a given CugPolicy is not inherited to the nested policies applied in the subtree.

Note: For performance reasons it is recommended to limited the usage of CugPolicys to a single or a couple of subtrees in the repository.

Management by Principal

Given the fact that a given CUG policy takes effect for all principals present in the system, access control management by Principal is not supported currently. The corresponding Jackrabbit API methods always return an empty policy array.

Permission Evaluation

As stated above evaluation of the restricted areas requires the PARAM_CUG_ENABLED configuration option to be set to true. This switch allows to setup restricted areas in a staging enviroment and only let them take effect in the public facing production instance.

If permission evaluation is enabled, the PermissionProvider implementation associated with the authorization model will prevent read access to all restricted areas defined by a CugPolicy. Only Principals explicitly allowed by the policy itself or the globally configured CugExclude will be granted read permissions to the affected items in the subtree.

For example, applying and persisting a new CugPolicy at path /content/restricted/apache_foundation, setting the principal names to apache-members and jackrabbit-pmc will prevent read access to the tree defined by this path for all Subjects that doesn't match any of the two criteria:

  • the Subject containsPrincipal apache-members and|or jackrabbit-pmc (as defined in the CugPolicy)
  • the Subject contains at least one Principal explicitly excluded from CUG evaluation in the configured, global CugExclude

This further implies that the PermissionProvider will only evaluate regular read permissions (i.e. READ_NODE and READ_PROPERTY). Evaluation of any other permissions including reading the cug policy node (access control content) is consequently delegated to other authorization modules. In case there was no module dealing with these permissions, access will be denied (see in section Combining Multiple Authorization Models for details).

Permission Evaluation with Multiplexed Stores

The CUG authorization module is not designed to be used in combination with non-default mounts. If any of the configured supported paths (see below) is found to be an ancestor of any non-default mount or included therein the activation/modification of the CugConfiguration will fail with immediately and log an error.

Representation in the Repository

CUG policies defined by this module in a dedicate node name rep:cugPolicy of type rep:CugPolicy. This node is defined by a dedicate mixin type rep:CugMixin (similar to rep:AccessControllable) and has a single mandatory, protected property which stores the name of principals that are granted read access in the restricted area:

[rep:CugMixin]
  mixin
  + rep:cugPolicy (rep:CugPolicy) protected IGNORE
  
[rep:CugPolicy] > rep:Policy
  - rep:principalNames (STRING) multiple protected mandatory IGNORE

Note: the multivalued rep:principalNames property reflects the fact that CUGs are intended to be used for small principal sets, preferably java.security.acl.Group principals.

Validation

The consistency of this content structure both on creation and modification is asserted by a dedicated CugValidatorProvider. The corresponding error are all of type AccessControl with the following codes:

Code Message
0020 Attempt to change primary type of/to cug policy
0021 Wrong primary type of ‘rep:cugPolicy’ node
0022 Access controlled not not of mixin ‘rep:CugMixin’
0023 Wrong name of node with primary type ‘rep:CugPolicy’

Configuration

The CUG authorization extension is an optional feature that requires mandatory configuration: this includes defining the supported paths and enabling the permission evaluation.

Configuration Parameters

The org.apache.jackrabbit.oak.spi.security.authorization.cug.impl.CugConfiguration supports the following configuration parameters:

Parameter Type Default Description
PARAM_CUG_ENABLED boolean false Flag to enable evaluation of CUG policies upon read-access.
PARAM_CUG_SUPPORTED_PATHS Set<String> - Paths under which CUGs can be created and will be evaluated.
PARAM_RANKING int 200 Ranking within the composite authorization setup.

Note: depending on other the authorization models deployed in the composite setup, the number of CUGs used in a given deployment as well as other factors such as predominant read vs. read-write, the performance of overall permission evaluation may benefit from changing the default ranking of the CUG authorization model.

Excluding Principals

The CUG authorization setup can be further customized by configuring the CugExcludeImpl service with allows to list additional principals that need to be excluded from the evaluation of restricted areas:

Parameter Type Default Description
principalNames Set<String> - Name of principals that are always excluded from CUG evaluation.

Note: This implementation extends the default exclusion list. Alternatively, it is possible to plug a custom CugExclude implementation matching specific needs (see below).

Pluggability

The following section describes how to deploy the CUG authorization model into an Oak repository and how to customize the CugExclude extension point.

Note: the reverse steps can be used to completely disable the CUG authorization model in case it is not needed for a given repository installation but shipped by a vendor such as e.g. Adobe AEM 6.3.

Deploy CugConfiguration

OSGi Setup

The following steps are required in order to deploy the CUG authorization model in an OSGi-base Oak repository:

  1. Deploy the oak-authorization-cug bundle
  2. Activate the CugConfiguration (“Apache Jackrabbit Oak CUG Configuration”) by providing the desired component configuration (ConfigurationPolicy.REQUIRE)
  3. Find the SecurityProviderRegistration (“Apache Jackrabbit Oak SecurityProvider”) configuration and enter org.apache.jackrabbit.oak.spi.security.authorization.cug.impl.CugConfiguration as additional value to the requiredServicePids property.

The third step will enforce the recreation of the SecurityProvider and hence trigger the RepositoryInitializer provided by the CUG authorization module.

Non-OSGi Setup

The following example shows a simplified setup that contains the CugConfiguration as additional authorization model (second position in the aggregation). See also unit tests for an alternative approach.

 // setup CugConfiguration
 ConfigurationParameters params = ConfigurationParameters.of(AuthorizationConfiguration.NAME,
         ConfigurationParameters.of(ConfigurationParameters.of(
                 CugConstants.PARAM_CUG_SUPPORTED_PATHS, "/content",
                 CugConstants.PARAM_CUG_ENABLED, true)));
 CugConfiguration cug = new CugConfiguration();
 cug.setParameters(params);
 
 // bind it to the security provider
 SecurityProvider securityProvider = SecurityProviderBuilder.newBuilder().with(configuration).build();
 
 CompositeConfiguration<AuthorizationConfiguration> composite = (CompositeConfiguration) securityProvider
       .getConfiguration(AuthorizationConfiguration.class);
 AuthorizationConfiguration defConfig = composite.getDefaultConfig();
 
 cug.setSecurityProvider(securityProvider);
 cug.setRootProvider(((ConfigurationBase) defConfig).getRootProvider());
 cug.setTreeProvider(((ConfigurationBase) defConfig).getTreeProvider());
 composite.addConfiguration(cug);
 composite.addConfiguration(defConfig);
 
 // create the Oak repository (alternatively: create the JCR repository)
 Oak oak = new Oak()
         .with(new InitialContent())
         // TODO: add all required editors
         .with(securityProvider);
         withEditors(oak);
 ContentRepository contentRepository = oak.createContentRepository();

Customize CugExclude

The following steps are required in order to customize the CugExclude implementation in a OSGi-based repository setup. Ultimately the implementation needs to be referenced in the org.apache.jackrabbit.oak.spi.security.authorization.cug.impl.CugConfiguration.

  1. implement CugExclude interface according to you needs,
  2. make your implementation an OSGi service
  3. deploy the bundle containing your implementation in the OSGi container and activate the service.
  4. make sure the default CUGExclude service is properly replaced by the custom implementation.
Example
@Component()
@Service(CugExclude.class)
public class MyCugExclude implements CugExclude {

    private static final Principal PRINCIPAL_APACHE_MEMBERS = new PrincipalImpl("apache-members");
    private static final Principal PRINCIPAL_JACKRABBIT_PMC = new PrincipalImpl("jackrabbit_pmc");

    public MyCugExclude() {}

    //-----------------------------------------------------< CugExclude >---
    @Override
    public boolean isExcluded(@Nonnull Set<Principal> principals) {
        return principals.contains(PRINCIPAL_APACHE_MEMBERS) || principals.contains(PRINCIPAL_JACKRABBIT_PMC);
    }

    //------------------------------------------------< SCR Integration >---
    @Activate
    private void activate(Map<String, Object> properties) {
    }
}