Background
Currently CloudStack provides very limited IAM services and there are several drawbacks within those services:
- Offers few roles out of the box (user and admin) with prebaked access control for these roles. There is no way to create additional roles with customized permissions.
- Some resources have access control baked into them. E.g., shared networks, projects etc.
- We have to create special dedicate API to grant permissions.
Goal for this feature would be to address these limitations and offer true IAM services in a phased manner
Architecture and Design description
IAM Taxonomy
Group
Group contains a number of CloudStack accounts. Customers should be able to Create, Edit, List and Delete Groups. Editing includes adding or removing accounts to or from a group. For backwards compatibility, out of box, CloudStack will provide 3 default groups:
- Root Admin Group
- Domain Admin Group
- End User Group
Account
Account is just our current CloudStack Account, all the permission controls are done at Account level. We can assign an Account to more than one Group.
User
CloudStack user just contains login credentials, and this is not the level that we are performing permission control.
Policy
Policy is a set of permission. Customer should be able to attach several policies to a Group to define the permission for that group. By default, we have the following 3 types of policy templates:
- Root Admin Policy: have permissions to all resources in the CloudStack.
- Domain Admin Policy: have permissions to all resources under the belonging domain.
- Resource Owner Policy: have permissions to all owned resources.
Other than that, customer should be able to define customized policies by grant or deny permission to customize permissions for the group. So far, for cross-account permission grant, we are currently supporting the following 3 types of granting/denying:
- Grant by Domain and Resource Type: grant permissions to all resources of the given resource type under the given domain.
- Grant by Account and Resource Type: grant permissions to all resources of the given resource type under the given account.
- Grant by individual resource: grant permission to an individual resource.
Permission
A policy consists of set of Permissions. A Permission is a way of defining access control.
Using Permission, customer defines what actions are allowed or denied, on what resources, under which account or domain.
A single permission definition consists of:
- Action (API Name)
- Allow / Deny
- Scope (Account | Domain | Resource)
- Scope Id (Id of the above defined scope)
- Resource Type
IAM Schema
![](/confluence/download/attachments/34838986/iam_schema.png?version=4&modificationDate=1394748493000&api=v2)
IAM API
New API's
- createAclGroup
- String name - name of the ACL group. Required
- String description - short decsription
- String domainId - UUID of the domain of the account owning the acl group
- deleteAclGroup
- String id - UUID of the ACL group. Required
- listAclGroups
- String name - name of the ACL group.
- String id - UUID of the ACL group.
- addAccountToAclGroup
- String id - UUID of the ACL group. Required
- List<String> accounts - comma separated list of account id that are going to be assigned to the acl group
- removeAccountFromAclGroup
- String id - UUID of the ACL group. Required
- List<String> accounts - comma separated list of account id that are going to be removed from the acl group
- createAclPolicy
- String name - name of the ACL Policy. Required
- String description - short decsription
- String domainId - UUID of the domain of the account owning the acl policy
- deleteAclPolicy
- String id - UUID of the ACL Policy. Required
- listAclPolicies
- String name - name of the ACL policy.
- String id - UUID of the ACL policy.
- attachAclPolicyToAclGroup
- String id - UUID of the ACL group. Required
- List<String> policies - comma separated list of policy ids that are going to be assigned to the acl group
- removeAclPolicyFromAclGroup
- String id - UUID of the ACL group. Required
- List<String> policies- comma separated list of policy ids that are going to be revoked from the acl group
- createAclPermission
- String action - name of the API allowed/denied. Required
- String permission - "Allow"/ "Deny"
- String scope- ("Account" / "Domain" / "Resource")
- String scope id - UUID of the Scope
- String resourceType
- addAclPermissionToAclPolicy
- String id - UUID of the ACL policy. Required
- List<String> permissionIds - comma separated list of permission ids that are going to be added to the acl policy
- removeAclPermissionFromAclPolicy
- String id - UUID of the ACL policy. Required
- List<String> permission Ids - comma separated list of permission ids that are going to be removed from the acl policy
IAM Interface
CloudStack currently has a domain-tree based implementation of access checks, namely com.cloud.acl.DomainChecker. This implementation is based on the an adapter interface of Cloudstack - org.apache.cloudstack.acl.SecurityChecker that defines the basic ACL interface to check ownership and access control to objects within the account/ domain.
The IAM plugin will provide another implementation of the SecurityChecker intrerface. We will also have to add to this interface some more methods or change some signatures to facilitate policy and Action based access control.