For the slide deck on RBAC and implementation design, please check out - https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1wNp1re47Isc_BX_wZWPjmJkOgnSqrlfhiNKRqJrirFE/edit#slide=id.p
Design discussion that has been signed off / agreed upon as of date
Use OPA and Envoy as sidecars in backend microservices for authorization
A program which can convert the json schema definitions to OPA rego code
Sample schema definition (Work in progress, but the design is more or less as it looks below, some parts of the json keys can change to make more meaningful naming convention)
{
"apis": [
{
"name": "createContent",
"uris": "/content/v1/create",
"upstream_url": "http://knowledge-mw:5000/v1/content/create",
"checks": [
{
"checkType": "roleCheck",
"key": "token",
"token": "CONTENT_CREATOR, COURSE_CREATOR"
},
{
"checkType": "orgCheck",
"key": "body",
"body": "request.content.createdFor[*]"
},
{
"checkType": "ownerCheck",
"key": "header || body",
"body": "request.userId",
"header": "X-User-Id"
}
]
}
]
}
Schema can use
||,&&or single keys. The||and&&signify OR and AND operation. If AND is used, then both keys are checked against the token and both need to match, if OR is used, then one of the key should match in the tokenSample token structure
{
"iss": "mykey",
"aud": "project-sunbird-stage-client",
"userid": "7e726898-0635-44cf-81ff-3b3a889c8dba",
"typ": "Bearer",
"exp": 1622744532,
"iat": 1622658132,
"roles": [
{
"scope": [
{
"orgId": "01269878797503692810"
}
],
"role": "COURSE_CREATOR"
},
{
"scope": [
{
"orgId": "ORG_001"
},
{
"orgId": "ORG_002"
}
],
"role": "BOOK_CREATOR"
}
]
}
Parser code (work in progress) - https://github.com/keshavprasadms/rego-go-parser
Addminutils will invoke the get user roles API and append the roles and orgs information to JWT token, sign it and then issue it to the user
Design disucssion that is work in progress
New proposed flow on Portal and Mobile for anonymous and logged sessions
The portal and mobile both will do a recaptcha check and pass the recaptcha response to backend for verification
Once recaptcha response is verified, and API call is made for anonymous session to fetch a token for the user
As of now we will allow only the portal and mobile app to invoke these register APIs on behalf of the user
These tokens (which are issued to portal and mobile on behalf of the useer) will have a higher rate limit (maybe 500 per hour)
A anonymous user can also directly obtain a token, how to do that is mentioned somewhere below in this post, but such token will have a very low ratelimit (maybe like 100 per hour)
Internal communication between services
Backend services can invoke APIs such as system APIs, metadata APIs etc anytime within the system (say backend batch job)
The services will be either injected with a token that is accepted by all services (and also passes the OPA checks) OR they will be routed via a separate service like private ingress which will attach a token to the request and forward to the backend
This token will have no expiry and can be used only for invoking the system, meta APIs
Using this token, user context APIs cannot be invoked. User context APIs will always require a user token
Registered users can obtain a token
As a registered user on the system you can obtain access tokens to invoke APIs for use cases like development, bulk content creation etc
There are two ways you can invoke the APIs
First option is to login on the system using Portal and use the
connect.sidcookie for all your APIs via postman / curl. These APIs need to be routed via Portal endpoing and cannot use the/apiendpointSecond way is to obtain a token first from keycloak, then use the keycloak’s refresh token to obtain a new token from adminutils which will have your roles information. You can use the access token issued by adminutils to invoke APIs using the
/apiendpoints
In either approach, what APIs you can access is decided by what roles you have on the system
Note: Kong validating the refresh token is not yet tested. But since the refresh token from keycloak is of type HS256, and we know the secret to be used to verify the HS256 signature, so we should be able to validate the keycloak token signature in kong also
External systems can obtain a token
Any external system that requires access to API’s, can sigup as an user on Sunbird and then use one of the mentioned flows to generate access token
API access as usual will be on the role of the user account on Sunbird
Any special API access can be granted by Sunbird admin by assigning the appropriate roles on the system
If the system requires user context API’s for other users, then they can authenticate on Sunbird as that user and then use the user specific token for any use cases involved in their end (similar to VDN authentication)
Design discussion that is yet to be done
External systems can obtain a token as anonymous
These are some special scenarios which we need to think
Pure anonymous access with higher rate limit can only be access via Portal / Mobile
For other systems where they need anonymous APIs access, we can expose an open endpoint from where a token will be issued which can be used for anonymous access
These will have very low rate limits to avoid APIs being access unknowingly as telemetry data, streaming url etc, will go unnoticed
This use case should be avoided if possible and APIs / tokens can be accessed / obtained only by signing up as a user on the system
Adding more fine grained roles and Rate Limits
We should have more fine grained roles so we can have ensure a user gets only specific set of APIs and not a wider set of APIs
Additional roles like below can be identified and introduced in the system
ORG_MANAGER
CONTENT_PUBLISHER etc
A possible introduction of redis for storing rate limit values as this will be a true ratelimit, instead of the local pod based rate limits