in our new software project, we have the following requirement: A webpage shall show a set of data. This data shall be editable by some users (assigned to roles, i.e. manager), and only viewable by others. The tricky part is described by an example:
A User-page consists of address data and account information. The addess data shall be editable by the user and the manager and viewable by all users, while account information shall only be viewable by the actual user and the manager.
I have read a lot of information about SpringSecurity. It provides a very good framework to gran permissions on urls and methods and even domain classes. But what I need is field level ACLs. At least, that's what I think at the moment.
So, the question is: How to solve this problem using Grails?
Thanks a lot in advance,
Regards Daniel
Spring Security (Acegi Plugin) is definitely the way to go with Grails.
There is a taglib you can use that will allow a page to be different for different roles such as the following:
<g:ifUserHasRole roles="ROLE_ADMIN">
html code for extra fields
</g:ifUserHasRole>
Me, I'd encode it on the domain class, emulating the way GORM has you annotate the domain classes (static access = [field1: "ROLE_USER", field2: "ROLE_ADMIN,ROLE_USER"] as an example). Then build a method your controller could use to redact them for a given user. That method could use the domain class's annotations to decide how to redact it. Then, metaprogram it onto each of the domain classes the way plugins do.
Similarly, write the opposite method to restrict data bindings of params into the domain class, write your own data binding utility method, then metaprogram it onto each domain class as well.
Then you can just use instance.redact(user) or instance.bindData(params, user) to do what you want, and it's practically declarative syntax.
We have a similar situation and use both the ifUserHasRole tag in the gsp to drive the appropriate presentation and the we have a filter that enforces the rules based on the action being called. For example, on user controller we would only allow the management roles to call save action, or if the user.id is the same as the session.user.id. This seemed to be the best option for our situation.
What about creating an ACL class like this:
class ACL(val entry: Entry*) {
def isAccessAllowed(subject: String, permission: String): Boolean = ...
}
class Entry(val subject: String, val permission: String*)
usage:
new ACL(
new Entry("dave", "read", "write"),
new Entry("linda", "read")
)
(This example is in Scala, because I found it more expressive in this case, but it should be easy to transfer it to Groovy.)
You would then connect an ACL object with the object to be protected.
Related
I would like to add a few additional ldap attributes (actually just one) to the userdetail object. It seems like the only way to do that is to override the usercontextmapper classes which then involves extending person class and essence class within it. It seems like a little too much work just to add some additional attributes. Before pursuing that route I wanted to make sure that there isnt another easier way to accomplish this.
Basically I have an attribute called "collections" in ldap which I would like to have available on the Principal object within my application.
Thanks
You don't have to extend the internal classes if you don't want to. The only thing that the UserDetailsContextMapper requires is that the object you return from mapUserFromContext implements UserDetails.
So you should be able to just read the attributes you want (including "collections") from the LDAP context object (the DirContextOperations) and use these to create your instance.
I am working on a project where we have requirement to provide field level access to users.
Example:
Suppose there is an entity named employee with several fields
The application should allow secure access at the field level of the entity.
According to the access user is allowed to edit / read the fields.
We have thought of an implementation using spring acl but it provides instance level security.
Could someone please let know an elegant way to implement it?
Thanks in advance.
Take a look at the fields plugin.
It allows you to control how individual fields are rendered.
You could implement a security check within each field's _field.gsp fragment, or you could override the plugin's taglib's f:all method and add a security check there if you prefer.
You could use the plugin for that, but you'd need to do some extra work. The ACL support in Spring Security basically lets you say "grant permission x on object instance y (of type "foo") with id z to person p". There is an example permissions class with standard instances like Read, Write, Admin, etc., but the underlying infrastructure only works with the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, etc. so you can easily define your own permission types - they're really just mappings of human-readable names to numbers. You typically grant permissions on domain object instances, but under the hood the names of the domain classes are just strings, so you could store any type name there. And the ids can be any value, e.g. a number or a string.
You wouldn't be able to use the #PreAuthorize and #PostFilter annotations on service methods, but you can still query the ACL beans to see if, given a field or whatever you want, the currently authenticated user is allowed to perform some action.
I know you can use the Authorize attribute to control access to a Controller or ActionMethod... but what about more fine grained control? It seems common to have specific fields be allowed/disallowed based on a user's role, for instance. Maybe on an employee profile the employee can edit his profile information, but only a supervisor can change his job title...
Optimally I'd like to be able to develop views, models and controllers normally and have a configuration page on the website that site admins could then use to configure authorization at whatever granularity is required. In other words the programmers shouldn't worry about it (except for the guy writing/integrating that specific part of the system.)
I can envision DisplayFor and EditorFor checking attributes to render fields as ReadOnly, Hidden, etc... and maybe the attributes get added at run time from an Authorization Provider of some kind.
The question is: Is there a framework or something out there that already does this?
Write a custom ModelMetaDataProvider that will allow you to alter the metadata for each model and it's properties before they make it to the view. The built in helpers will not render a field if it's metadata value ShowForEdit = false or ShowForDisplay = false.
You can utilize a rules engine or some other ACL to manipulate the metadata on each model and property to get most of the behavior your looking for out of the box without touching the built in helpers. On edge cases where you need more control you can write your own helpers and pass more complex data in the metadata.AdditionalValues dictionary.
You can implement security at field level using HtmlHelper. In the following example they used textbox only implementation but it can easily be extended for all type of controls:
http://bartreyserhove.blogspot.ca/2008/12/field-level-security-using-aspnet-mvc.html
I'd like to know if it's possible with grails to specify a scope for the domain classes.
Few words to explain how my application is working at the moment:
- database access is done through an external "module" using SQLJ. This module is user by controllers in my grails app.
- a user ask for specific information submitting forms -> request submitted to the external module -> information extracted from the database -> information loaded into grails mem DB (HSQL) -> information displayed in views.
It works fine in development environment as i'm the only one using the application. But i'm wondering how the application would behave with two or more users. I mean, do the information loaded into grails memory database will be shared between users or not? And how not to shared information requested by one user with the others?
Thanks in advance for any help about this subject.
Regards.
All data in the database is shared across all users of the grails application. You would have to write a custom query to limit the data returned to a specific user. Based on your application maybe something similar to the following.
class DomainClass1 {
//fields you get from SQLJ go here
int userId
}
To get data into an instance of your domain class.
def domInstance=new DomainClass1()
domInstance.loadFromSQLJ() //call the SQLJ module and put it's data in the domain class
domInstance.userId=5 //assign the user associated with this info
domInstance.save()
Then when you want to display info for the user with the userId 5
def domInstance2=DomainClass1.findByUserId(5)
//Do stuff with domInstance2
It will be shared between all users.
But it depends on you, as for any other database, there must be some criteria (db column) by which you can choose only information related to current user.
In our project, we overrode domain classes' get(), list() that take into account domain aggregate root (a User or whatever), and also check all the named queries.
This leaves off all the other means of accessing instances, like findBy*(), criteria, findWhere() (though you can also override the dynamic methods), or HQL, but anyway reduces the amount of security review by 80%.
Suddenly it turned out to be OK to use DomainClass.list() in scaffolding.
I am using SF 1.2.9 to build a website. I want to use the admin generator to provide admin functionality for the object models I have used (specifically LIST, edit and delete).
I have read the Symfony docs (Chapter 14), but unless, I am very much mistaken, all examples I have come accross so far, seems to be written for a single user environment only. Meaning that the list of records returned to the user is essentially, ALL the records in that table. In a multiuser environment, this is irresposible at best, and potentially, a security threat. It is a necessary requirement to restrict the list of records returned to a user to only those that they own (i.e. created).
Suppose I have a table with (YML) schema like this:
foobar_dongle:
id: ~
title: varchar(255)
info: longvarchar
owner_id: ~
created_at: ~
where owner id is a FK into a user table.
Assume I generate an admin module like this:
symfony propel:generate-admin backend FoobarDongle --module=dongle
Question:
How do I modify the list of records returned to a user in the LIST part of the code generated by the admin generator? As I mentioned above, currently, (i.e. out of the box), the admin generator presents the user (rather naively, I feel), with the ENTIRE set of records for the model being administered. I need to be able to restrict that list somehow, so that I can only return records owned by that user.
This is what I am trying to find out how to do.
I would be most grateful to anyone who can show me how I can restrict the list of records returned when using the admin generator for administration of an object model. Ideally, I would like to be able to specify a custom method that has all the custom 'filtering' logic - but so long as I can restrict the LIST of records a user can see (in admin), to only the records that he is the owner of, that is all I want to be able to do.
If you only want to restrict the returned objects in one or two modules, do this:
Go to the actions.class.php file of your module. There should be no methods by default and the class should inherit from autoModuleNameActions you. Insert the following method:
protected function buildQuery()
{
$query = parent::buildQuery();
// do what ever you like with the query like
$query->andWhere('user_id = ?', $this->getUser()->getId());
return $query;
}
But this becomes unhandy if you do it for more modules. In this case I would advice to create a new admin generator theme.
And if you want to make the query depending on some custom parameter in the admin generator config file, then you have to extend this file. But is not just done with adding a new parameter. You can read this article how to do this.
If you want to know more about the auto generated classes, have a look at this class: cache/[app]/[env]/modules/auto[ModuleName]/actions/actions.class.php.
Edit after comments:
I think you looked at the wrong class. Look here: cache/[app]/[env]/modules/auto[ModuleName]/actions/actions.class.php.
I set up a Propel project to check it and the method that is interesting for you is:
protected function buildCriteria()
{
if (is_null($this->filters))
{
$this->filters = $this->configuration->getFilterForm($this->getFilters());
}
$criteria = $this->filters->buildCriteria($this->getFilters());
$this->addSortCriteria($criteria);
$event = $this->dispatcher->filter(new sfEvent($this, 'admin.build_criteria'), $criteria);
$criteria = $event->getReturnValue();
return $criteria;
}
I also posted the whole content of this class to pastebin. It is a lot, the function is in line 245. Even if you don't find this class, you should be able to override this method like this:
protected function buildCriteria()
{
$criteria = parent::buildCriteria();
// do something with it
return $criteria;
}
I don't know about these criteria objects, so I can't help you with that but I hope the other things help you.
You should use sfGuardPlugin to provide your login/user functionality - it includes user groups and permissions that can be assigned to users and/or groups.
Using security.yml you can then configure which permissions/credentials are required to access individual actions. IE: you can allow everyone to access the list/update/delete actions, but only people with the create permission to access the create page.
The docs for sfGuardPlugin are worth reading:
http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfGuardPlugin
Plus this section from the jobeet tutorial covers sfGuard and also use of security.yml and credentials:
http://www.symfony-project.org/jobeet/1_2/Propel/en/13
And to round off, this page from the book is relevant too:
http://www.symfony-project.org/reference/1_2/en/08-Security (although not sure it covers anything that isn't in the page i linked from jobeet)