Home Library: Security and user management

In gCube 3.0, Home Library delivers a facility to support:

• user & group management
• access control management

Managing users and groups

Home Library can:

• List users
• Create user
• Delete user
• List groups
• Get group
• Create group
• Update group
• Delete group

Users and Groups are stored in the repository as JCR nodes.

Jackrabbit API

Jackrabbit provied and additional API for security and user management. This is about user & group management.

User Manager is exposed through a

• org.apache.jackrabbit.api.security.user.UserManager

Managing permessions

A repository may support access control management, enabling the following:

• Privilege discovery: Determining the privileges that a user has in relation to a node.
• Assigning access control policies: Setting the privileges that a user has in relation to a node using access control policies specific to the implementation.

Privilege Discovery

A privilege represents the ability to perform a particular set of operations on a node. Each privilege is identified by a JCR name. JCR defines a set of standard privileges within the Privilege interface.

Permissions / Privileges

These permissions, called "privileges", are defined by the JCR 2.0 specification. This is basically the set of read, create, modify and delete operations that can be done on nodes and properties via the JCR API. A repository can also define custom privileges.

Basic privileges:

• jcr:read: The privilege to retrieve a node and get its properties and their values.
• jcr:modifyProperties: The privilege to create, remove and modify the values of the properties of a node.
• jcr:addChildNode: The privilege to create child nodes of a node.
• jcr:removeNode: The privilege to remove a node.
• jcr:removeChildNodes: The privilege to remove child nodes of a node.
• jcr:write: An aggregate privilege that contains:
  • jcr:read,
  • jcr:modifyProperties,
  • jcr:addChildNodes,
  • jcr:removeNode,
  • jcr:removeChildNodes
• jcr:all: An aggregate privilege that contains all available permissions, including:
  • jcr:read,
  • jcr:write and the advanced permssions.

Jackrabbit API

Access control is exposed through a

• javax.jcr.security.AccessControlManager

ACL Model

Resource-based ACLs

Resource-based ACLs are the default access control mechanism in Jackrabbit 2.x. That means that a resource = node is associated with a list of allow/deny entries for certain principals (users or groups), which naturally maps to store them along the JCR node. A core concept of resource-based ACLs is that they inherit the ACLs from the parent node, thus for each node, all the ACLs of its ancestor come into play as well.

How Resource-based ACLs are stored

Resource-based ACLs are stored per resource/node in a special child node rep:policy. This one will have a list of rep:GrantACE child nodes (usually named allow, allow0,...) for grant access control entries and rep:DenyACE child nodes (usually named deny, deny0,...) for deny access control entries. Each ACE node has a rep:principalName STRING property pointing to the user or group this ACE belongs to, and a rep:privileges NAME multi-value property, containing all the privileges of this ACE.

Repository Configuration

To use the Resource-based ACL mechanism, a different AccessControlProvider has been configured. This is set in the <Workspace/> element of the repository.xml.

    <WorkspaceSecurity>
        <AccessControlProvider class="org.apache.jackrabbit.core.security.authorization.acl.ACLProvider" />
    </WorkspaceSecurity>

Permissions checking from scripts

HL provides a service (AuthorizablePrivilegesInfo) to know what actions the current user is provisioned to do. The AuthorizablePrivilegesInfo provides methods for checking the following actions: