Eacus, the holder of the keys of Hades, is an Attribute-Based Access Control (ABAC) authorization framework for Ruby.
"Aeacus telemon by user Ravenous at en.wikipedia.org - Public domain through Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aeacus_telemon.jpg"
Eaco provides your application's Resources discretionary access based on attributes. Access to a Resource by an Actor is determined by checking whether the Actor owns the security attributes (Designators) required by the Resource.
Each Resource protected by Eaco has an ACL attached. ACLs define which security attribute grant access to the Resource, and at which level. The level of access is expressed in terms of roles. Roles are scoped per Resource types.
Each Role then describes a set of abilities that it can perform. In your code, you check directly whether an Actor has a specific ability on a Resource, and all the indirection is then evaluated by Eaco.
Security attributes are extracted out of Actors through the Designators framework, a pluggable mechanism whose details are up to your application.
An Actor can have many designators, that describe its identity or its belonging to a group or occupying a position in a department.
Designators are Ruby classes that can embed any sort of custom behaviour that your application requires.
ACLs are hashes with designators as keys and roles as values. Extracting authorized collections requires only an hash key lookup mechanism in your database. Adapters are provided for PG's +jsonb+ and for CouchDB-Lucene.
Add this line to your application's Gemfile:
gem 'eaco'
And then execute:
$ bundle
Create config/authorization.rb
(rdoc)
# Defines `Document` to be an authorized resource.
#
# Adds Document.accessible_by and Document#allows?
#
authorize Document, using: :pg_jsonb do
roles :owner, :editor, :reader
permissions do
reader :read
editor reader, :edit
owner editor, :destroy
end
end
# Defines an actor and the sources from which the
# designators are harvested.
#
# Adds User#designators
#
actor User do
admin do |user|
user.admin?
end
designators do
user from: :id
group from: :groups
tag from: :tags
end
end
Given a Resource (rdoc) with an ACL (rdoc):
# An example ACL
>> document = Document.first
=> #<Document id:42 name:"President's report for loans.docx" [...]>
>> document.acl
=> #<Document::ACL {"user:10" => :owner, "group:reviewers" => :reader}>
and an Actor (rdoc):
# An example Actor
>> user = User.find(10)
=> #<User id:10 name:"Bob Fropp" group_ids:['employees'], tags:['english']>
>> user.designators
=> #<Set{ #<Designator(User) value:10>, #<Designator(Group) value:"employees">, #<Designator(Tag) value:"english"> }
you can check if the Actor can perform a specific action on the Resource:
>> user.can? :read, document
=> true
>> document.allows? :read, user
=> true
and which access level (role
) the Actor has for this Resource:
>> document.roles_of user
=> [:owner]
>> boss = User.find_by_group('reviewer').first
=> #<User id:42 name:"Jake Leister" group_ids:['reviewers', 'bosses']>
>> document.roles_of boss
=> [:reader]
>> boss.can? :read, document
=> true
>> boss.can? :destroy, document
=> false
>> user.can? :destroy, document
=> true
Grant reader access to a specific user:
>> user
=> #<User id:42 name:"Bob Frop">
>> document.grant :reader, :user, user.id
=> #<Document::ACL "user:42" => :reader>
>> user.can? :read, document
=> true
Grant reader access to a group:
>> user
=> #<User id:42 groups:['reviewers']>
>> document.grant :reader, :group, 3
=> #<Document::ACL "group:reviewers" => :reader>
>> user.can? :read, document
=> true
>> document.allows? :read, user
=> true
Obtain a collection of Resources accessible by a given Actor (rdoc):
>> Document.accessible_by(user)
Check whether a controller action can be accessed by an user. Your
Controller must respond to current_user
for this to work.
(rdoc)
class DocumentsController < ApplicationController
before_filter :find_document
authorize :show, [:document, :read]
authorize :edit, [:document, :edit]
private
def find_document
@document = Document.find(params[:id])
end
end
You need a running postgresql 9.4 instance.
Create an user and a database:
$ sudo -u postgres psql
postgres=# CREATE ROLE eaco LOGIN;
CREATE ROLE
postgres=# CREATE DATABASE eaco OWNER eaco ENCODING 'utf8';
CREATE DATABASE
postgres=# ^D
Create features/active_record.yml
with your database configuration,
see features/active_record.example.yml
for an example.
Run bundle
once. This will install the base bundle.
Run appraisal
once. This will install the supported Rails versions and +pg+.
Run rake
. This will run the specs and cucumber features and report coverage.
Specs are run against the supported rails versions in turn. If you want to
focus on a single release, use appraisal rails-X.Y rake
, where X.Y
can be
3.2
, 4.0
, 4.1
or 4.2
.
- Fork it ( https://github.com/ifad/eaco/fork )
- Create your feature branch (
git checkout -b my-new-feature
) - Commit your changes (
git commit -am 'Add some feature'
) - Push to the branch (
git push origin my-new-feature
) - Create a new Pull Request
This software is Made in Italy 🇮🇹 😄.