Advanced Hybrid RBAC

Role-based access control (RBAC) principles are present in almost all identity management systems. Therefore, it is no surprise that RBAC is one of the basic midPoint mechanisms to organize privileges in midPoint. MidPoint supports all the usual RBAC features such as role hierarchies, an automatic assignment of roles, entitlement definition etc. However, midPoint goes beyond traditional RBAC. midPoint is using a (very) extended version of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) mechanism. RBAC is originally defined as mostly static structure of users and roles. The original RBAC defines that user assigned to the role gets all the rights implied by the role. If two users have the same role, they have the same privileges. However, this leads to the problem of role rxplosion and numerous role maintenance problems. We mitigate such problems by enhancing RBAC model with logic. We extended basic RBAC model with ability to specify expressions in role definitions that determine how and when the role is used. Therefore, the role can adapt to the attributes of user that has the role or even the role assignment itself can be parametrized. This allows to construct RBAC structures that are using fewer roles and that are much more manageable.

Moreover, midPoint RBAC system can be applied to the roles themselves, thus creating meta-roles. It is quite common that the roles are divided into several types: application roles, business roles, technical roles and so on. However, all the business roles have common characteristics such as common approval processes, common life-cycle policies etc. Instead of copying the common parts into each and every business role, the business roles may be assigned a common archetype which acts as a meta-role. Archetype defines all the common characteristics of all business roles, therefore the RBAC system is much easier to maintain.

MidPoint advanced RBAC mechanism, together with role auto-assignment capabilities and other policy mechanisms create a very powerful combination to express complex policies: policy-based RBAC. Although midPoint policy mechanisms are based on RBAC principles, its capabilities are similar to other popular access control models, such as attribute-based access control (ABAC) or policy-based access control (PBAC).

Roles define similar set of access rights. Roles are assigned to users; a user having a role gets the rights defined by the role. We do not place any constraints on the number of roles assigned to the user or the number of access rights (accounts) defined by the role. All the associations can be thought of as many-to-many. Basic role structure is illustrated in a following diagram.

The usual use of roles is to imply accounts on the resources and therefore ease the user and account administration by employing RBAC approach. However, this is usually not enough to implement efficient and maintainable identity management solution. The simple approach leads to role explosion. The roles need to contain parts of logic to make them efficient.

Roles can naturally contain other roles therefore creating a role hierarchy. Role hierarchies can be quite complex both in their structure and embedded logic. As midPoint uses the relative change model it is quite easy to merge values from many roles and therefore it allows creation of very complex RBAC structures. Important parts of the hierarchy are exposed to the expressions in individual roles therefore the role hierarchies can be combined with parametric roles (see below) to support very complex and flexible RBAC-like models.

Roles in traditional identity management systems can only be simply assigned to a user or unassigned from a user. And that’s all the flexibility. However this is not enough to efficiently model complex real-world scenarios. For example the role of Assistant can have some generic parts that are common to each assistant but there may be few parts that are specific for each sub-group of users or even for each individual user. For example identification of a building or department for which the assistant works, date of role activation and deactivation, the financial limit that an assistant is authorized to handle, etc. In traditional systems this leads to a necessity of creating roles such as AssistantNewYork, AssistantLondon and AssistantBratislava. This alone is quite difficult to manage because there is also need to ClerkNewYork, ClerkLondon and ClerkBratislava and the same for office manager, purchasing manager, …​ And when it comes to roles such as PurchasingManagerAssistant2013NewYork5000 it is quite sure that the solution got a severe role explosion problem.

Parametric roles provide a solution for some of the role explosion situations. Parametric roles allow to specify certain role parameters at assignment time. That means that one Assistant role is usually enough. The identification of branch, building, department, activation and deactivation dates and other role parameters is specified when the role is assigned to the user. The parameters can vary for each user. The expressions in the Assistant role can use such parameters and determine the specific account attributes and entitlements dynamically. The assignment parameters correspond to the concept of contract or affiliation that are frequently used in business modelling.

This approach dramatically reduces the number of roles needed for the IDM solution and makes the entire RBAC deployment considerably more manageable.

Things may get really complicated when IDM solution is meant to synchronize much more than just users and accounts. And midPoint is designed to be very generic about what it synchronizes. E.g. an IDM solution may want to create groups on resource as an representation of midPoint roles. But how does midPoint know on which resources the groups should be created? And how they should look like? This is both easy and complex but there is a very elegant solution. MidPoint already has a mechanism for this: RBAC. And by following midPoint approach we try to apply existing mechanisms as much as possible and practical. Therefore we have applied the mechanism or roles to the roles themselves. Thus creating a concept of meta-roles (and meta-meta-roles and meta-meta-meta-roles, …​) This may sound crazy but it in fact a very elegant and powerful mechanism. See Roles and Policies Configuration and Generic Synchronization for more details.