RBAC on Sunbird

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 token

• Sample 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.sid cookie for all your APIs via postman / curl. These APIs need to be routed via Portal endpoing and cannot use the /api endpoint

  • Second 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 /api endpoints

• 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 in kong

Design discussion that is yet to be done