Hey, this is my blog

It is somewhat abandoned.

Enterprise Software Authorization / Security

lockSecurity Thoughts:

There are generally three types of authorization in enterprise applications:

  1. Role based security - Which actions can a user do - aka role-based access control
  2. Entity level security - A user can only perform an Action on certain objects/data - aka row level security
  3. Field level security - A user can see or edit only certain fields of an entity – (this is really fine grained and usually a bad idea)

There is a framework that covers all 3 of these authorization types, Rhino Security. It allows authorization to be abstracted from the business logic as a cross-cutting concern. It is deigned to handle 1 & 2 above, but people have used it to implement 3.

Here is an example of the type of rules it can easily encompass:

Survey Entity:

A survey has a start date, an end date, can be marked as applicable to a specific population, may be public or private, etc.

View Restrictions:

The specification says that a survey that the user does not own should only be visible to a user iff:

  • The survey is public
  • The survey is active
  • The survey has started
  • The survey has not ended
  • The survey is for a population that the user is a member of

http://ayende.com/Blog/archive/2009/12/11/handling-complex-security-conditions-with-rhino-security.aspx

Entity Group:

The key concept that separates it from standard role based security is the concept of an entity-group. Entity groups are group of, well, entities and users can be granted/denied access to them just like actions.

I would really love to see someone port this concept to the entity framework. It certainly might not be right for every project, but a cohesive strategy for access control would be a big leap forward compared to a lot of projects I’ve worked on.

Further Reading: