[Kimchi-devel] RFC: Design of Authorization in Kimchi

[Aline Manera]

On 07/07/2014 06:45 AM, Wen Wang wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Due to the fact that Kimchi needs authorization feature to be designed.
> I an posting my point of view below of how I thought about doing it,
> including how I plan doing it in the front-end and request for help for
> the back end support.
>
> Kimchi changed to a traditional login patten in last release that makes
> Kimchi more secure to use. It Before login, the front-end can hardly get
> any html information before user actually login.

If the user is not logged in, Kimchi server will always return 401 for 
all the requests.
As the front end make requests to server to populate the html, if the 
user hardly gets any html he/she will get it empty without any useful 
information
At least, it is suppose to work like that.

  As we discussed, root
> user will have full access to Kimchi whereas the non-root user will have
> restricted privileges. It will be easier and more decent to show the
> proper tabs to certain users that distinguished by the back-end. Now the
> tabs are generated by an xml file generated from the back-end that show
> all 5 tabs. We probably need to have the '*Host*' and '*template*'
> tab_removed_ for non-root users, which is recommended to be done in the
> back-end.

I suggest to add one parameter to the tabs in the xml.

Example: access="restricted" which means only root users can see those tabs

And in the front end while loading the tabs, we need to query this 
parameter and act accordingly (ie, do not display the tab with this 
parameter for a non-root user)

<tabs>
     <tab access="restricted">
         <title>Host</title>
         <path>tabs/host.html>
     </tab>
     <tab>
         <title>Guests</title>
         <path>tabs/guests.html>
     </tab>
     ...
</tabs>

>
> Also there need to be information provided to the front-end like the
> user-name, user-role as well as user-group, etc. that indicate user
> identity after login.


The browser need the information to give certain
> privileges to certain users and disable the unnecessary functions. My
> suggestion is to have these 3 parameters passed: ***user-name,
> user-role* as well as *user-group*. There is a better extendibility to
> user the user-role other than isRoot so that we can define more roles in
> the future. As fact that we have only defined two roles now, the
> user-role parameter can be divided into root and guest based on user is
> root or non-root.

Today that information is returned as response for the request /login

POST /login {username: alinefm, password: mypassword}
{
     username: alinefm,
     sudo: true,
     groups: [group1, group2]
}

If "sudo" is true, the user has root permissions, otherwise it is a 
non-root user.

Based on that you said, I propose to change the "sudo" parameter to 
"role" and it the user has root permissions we set it to "admin", 
otherwise, "user"

POST /login {username: alinefm, password: mypassword}
{
     username: alinefm,
     role: admin,
     groups: [group1, group2]
}


These message can get from *sessiondada*, *cookie *or
> passed according to a query. the way passing the info of the user is
> still under discussion.

As you will get that info after a login request I propose to store that 
info locally on JS


Request for your advises.
>
> Best Regards
>
> Wang Wen
>
>
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