CoreOne Suite Advanced Permission Management

Introduction

By default, the CoreOne Suite is deployed with a set of security roles that you can assign to users to perform basic sets of operations. For example there is a Manage Representations security role. If you assign this role to a user, he will be able to see his representations in the CoreOne Self-Service Portal and can delegate some of his responsibilities to others.

This default security role always cover a basic use case and do have some restrictions attached to it. For example the Manage Representations security role only let’s a user delegate something to another Core Identity for which the user first has created a representation. In an eGoverment environment this is a valid use, but in an enterprise environment you might want to enable the user to delegate his permissions to everyone in the company or to co-workers in the same division or any other use case.

This is where the CoreOne Advanced Permission Management comes into place. This optional module allows you to create your own security rules. A security role contain two things, the view permissions and the data access permission. The view permissions are used across all UIs to handle who has access to which views and which actions. The access permissions are used to determinate what data is available to the user or service within the views or APIs. This way you can give certain users access to view and limit them to a subset of the available data.

Data Access Permissions

Data access permissions are configured by specifying the entity type, a security mode and a security filter. The entity type defines to which entity, i.e. a Core Identity or a Role, a user has access to. The security mode defines the nature of the access such as read, write, delete or similar. And finally the security filter specifies which conditions have to be met in order to give access. This can be anything from full access to only if a specific condition is met. You will find more on that in the Data Access Permissions section. But it’s important to understand that you can configure security filters based on relations and other attributes of the entity.

Security Roles Pitfalls

As we have learned, the security roles are a powerful tool to build various use cases. But there are a few things that need to be considered.

Performance

The more complex the filter get, the more slower the system will be for the user. If no filter is configured for let’s say roles, the user can be served with the list of roles immediately. But if we configure a security filter that only shows roles to a user that match certain criteria, those criteria have to be evaluated at runtime and therefore will take some time. Depending on the amount of roles, the amount of security filters applied and the complexity of the filters, this may be noticeable to the user.

Maintenance

If you build your own custom use case, you might have to combine a few entity rights to cover your use case. For example if you only want to give read rights to roles that are assigned to a specific organizational unit and the user has a specific employment type, you will not only need to give read rights to the roles, but you will also need to give read rights to the users employments, where the employment type of the user is stored. After an update of the Software it is possible that this data structure has changed. For example the employment type of the user might no longer be stored on the employment but on the Core Identity itself. Even tough such changes rarely happen and are documented in the release notes, there is still a chance. So in order to be sure, you should test each of your security role after each update. When designing security roles, you have to take this into account and plan accordingly.

Relying on default roles

If you use any of our default security roles, you have to be aware that they can change. They are intended to cover a standard use case as described in the documentation. But even though that standard use case might match your use case today, does not mean it will automatically match your use case after an update. We might add some rights to the default security rule that will not match your use case, so you should check the release notes carefully.

Creating Custom Security Roles

You can create custom security roles in the Admin UI. Go to Administration -> Securityroles and click create. Make sure to choose a good name for you rule.

This will automatically create a Ressource with the same name. You can use this ressource to assign your new security rule to core identities.

Best practices

Testing, testing, testing

It’s vital that you test your security rules after each update. Create a basic test plan for your most crucial cases and execute them after each update.

Blueprints

If you are planning on creating a lot of security roles that only have minor differences, try to extract the common things into a base security rule and only specify the difference in specific security rules. It might also be useful to create a blueprint, test the blueprint after each update and redeploy all specific rules based on the blue print if you have detected any changes.