Improved authz

Goals

The current (1.9) implementation of authz is lacking in two areas:

• Performance when a large number of paths needs to be checked. Affected operations are mainly checkout / export and log.
  
• Support for wildcards. Subversion should support
  • "*" or single, arbitrary path segments (with no "/" in them) and
  • "**" for arbitrary length non-empty paths.
  • Classic wildcard patterns like "*foo*.bar" shall be supported.
    All wildcard usage applies to full path segments only, i.e. a '*'
    never matches a '/' except for the case of "/**/" where it matches
    one to many full segments.
    

Terminology

A path consists of segments, separated by "/". Whildcards are valid segments and their interpretation depends on the context.

A rule set contains a number of rules, each describing what users shall have which access rights. Users might be specified indirectly by using groups.

A path rule specifies what rule set applies to a given path.

Inheritance and disambiguation

These are the rules as of today, with rule 3 added to support ambiguous path patches caused by pattern matching.

1. Path rules implicitly apply to all paths in the respective sub-tree.
   2. If multiple path rules match a given repository path, only the path rule(s) that cover the most segments shall apply.
   3. If multiple path rules cover the same number of segments, only the one specified last in the authz file shall apply.
   4. If there are multiple rules in a rule set for a given user, the union of all rights granted shall apply.
   5. The following rule is implicitly added as the first rule given no access to anybody by default.

[/]
* =

Design

The idea is to use combine the following approaches:

• Preprocessed, tree-like data structures applied to segmented paths
• Reduction of the tree to what applies to the current user
• Pre-calculate recursive rights for early exist
  

In the initial implementation we may rely on the svn_config API to provide us with parser functionality. At that stage, we don't need an independent representation of the whole file contents.

General workflow

Putting caching aside, the workflow involved three data models, building on top of each other.

• Parsing an authz file (from file system or repository) yields a consolidated hash (additive sections being combined automatically) of it contents in svn_config_t.
  

• Filtered path rule tree
  • prefix tree with one node per segment
  • created on demand per user and repository
  • contains only rules that apply to the respective user and repository
  • multiple instances of that being cached in the svn_authz_t structure alongside the single svn_config_t
  • rule sets being reduced to access rights + order ID
  • each node knows min / max rights on all sub-nodes
    
• Lookup state
  • access rights accordingly the latest matching path rule
  • list of tree nodes that may match sub-paths as we may need to follow multiple patterns
  • temporary data structure thats reused between queries to save on allocation and construction overhead
    
    

Data models

These are persistent in the sense that we will cache and reuse them. They do not cover transient data models that various algorithms may use e.g. during authz parsing.

Unless indicated otherwise, all collections are ordered.

Only abstract types / the interface view is given here; the actual implementation may be different.

Filtered path rule tree

filtered-tree :=
        root      : filtered-node	// exists due to default path rule

filtered-node :=
	segment   : string		// empty for root
	access    : ref to access-type	// empty if no path ends here
	min-rights: none | r | w | rw	// user's minimum rights on any path in the sub-tree
	max-rights: none | r | w | rw	// user's maximum rights on any path in the sub-tree
	repeat    : boolean		// set on nodes for "**" segments

	sub-nodes : { map following segment => filtered-node }[0..*]
					// one node per non-wildcard in following segment
					// empty if no rules on following segments

	// the following will be aggregated into a sub-structure to
	// facilitate a quick "has pattern sub-segment?" check
	any       : filtered-node	// empty if no path rule with "*" in following segment
	any-var   : filtered-node	// empty if no path rule with "**" in following segment
	prefixed  : { list of filtered-node }[0..*]
					// empty if no path rule like "bar*" in following segment
	suffixed  : { list of filtered-node }[0..*]
					// empty if no path rule like "*bar" in following segment
	complex   : { list of filtered-node }[0..*]
					// empty if no path rule with complex wildcard pattern
                                        // like "*for*bar" in following segment

access-type :=
	order-id  : integer		// increases with declaration order in the file
	rights    : none | r | w | rw

Lookup state

lookup-state :=
	access    : ref to access-type	// user's rights for this path
	min-rights: none | r | w | rw	// user's minimum rights on any path in the sub-tree
					// (aggregated over RIGHTS and all nodes in CURRENT)
	max-rights: none | r | w | rw	// user's maximum rights on any path in the sub-tree
					// (aggregated over RIGHTS and all nodes in CURRENT)
	current   : { ref to filtered-node }[0..*]
					// sub nodes of these may match the next segment

Algorithms

Normalization

Wildcard sequences in paths in rule sets shall be normalized. This is merely done to reduce matching costs later on.

	// Variable length wildcards must be the last in a sequence
	while path contains "/**/*/"
		replace occurrence with "/*/**/"

	// Consecutive variable length wildcards are redundant
	while path contains "/**/**/"
		replace occurrence with "/*/**/"

	// Trailing variable length wildcards are redundant
	if path ends with "/**"
		replace occurrence with "/*"

	// "**" within segment patterns are redundant
	while path contains "**" not immediately preceded by "/"
		replace occurrence with "*"
	while path contains "**" not immediately followed by "/"
		replace occurrence with "*"

Lookup

Since there is always an implicit path rule at the root for all users, lookup is always necessary.

	init(tree : ref to filtered-tree):
		return new lookup-state
			.rights = tree.root.rule
			.current = { tree.root }, if has_subnodes(tree.root)
        	                   { }, otherwise

Checking whether we need to continue in our path matching is trivial, just check whether there are any potential matches to sub-paths.

	done(state : ref to lookup-state):
		return is_empty(state.current)

One step in the lookup iteration, i.e. matching the next segment, is relatively simple as well. For simplicity, we ignore the min / max rights optimization here.

	latest(lhs : ref to access-type, rhs : ref to access-type):
		if is_empty(lhs)
			return rhs
		if is_empty(rhs) or lhs.order-id > rhs.order-id
			return lhs
		return rhs

	step(state : ref to lookup-state, segment : string):
		next = { }
		access = empty
		foreach node in state.current:
			if node.repeat:
				next += node
				access = latest(access, node.access)
			foreach sub-node in all-subnodes(node):	// simplified
				if matches(sub-node, segment):	// simplified
					next += sub-node
					access = latest(access, sub-node.access)

		if not is_empty(access)
			state.rights = access
		state.current = next

So, the full lookup without caching is

	lookup(tree : ref to filtered-tree, path : string):
	state = init(tree)
	foreach segment in path
		if done(state)
			break;
		state = step(state, segment)
	return state.rights

Implementation Notes

Changes from Current Behaviour

Rules Defined Only Once

The config-based parser would merge and override access entries in redefined rules. The new parser rejects authz files that define the same rule more than once.

New Rule Syntax for Wildcard Rules

Existing rules come in two flavours; repository-specific and global:

   [repos:/path]
   [/path]

In these rules, /path is always matched literally. The new parser supports two new forms for rules with paths that contain wildcards:

   [:glob:repos:/path]
   [:glob:/path]

Because a glob rule is not required to actually contain wildcards in the path, two sections with different names may represent the same rule; for example,

   [/path]
   [:glob:/path]

the above two rules are identical. The new parser detects (and rejects) such collisions.

Write-only Access is Not Allowed

The config-based authz parser will allow access entries that grant only write access; e.g.,

   [/]
   * = w

The new parser flags such entries as invalid; our authz implementation does not support write-only access.

Only Group Definitions in the Global Groups File

The new parser allows only group definitions (i.e., only the [groups] section) in the global groups file. The config-based parser would allow other sections there, but they would be ignored.