authorization-rules-details.md

Authorization rules in ROR

In ROR we have plenty of authorization rules:

1. groups and groups_or
2. ldap_authorization (and ldap_auth which is an authentication and an authorization rule at the same time)
3. groups_provider_authorization
4. jwt_auth (and ror_kbn_auth)

They are very similar. The main difference is the source of the user groups.

In a nutshell, a ROR authorization rule logic consists of the following steps:

1. obtaining users' groups
2. checking groups logic

Obtaining users' groups

Each authorization rule has a different method of obtaining the users' groups:

• groups and groups_or - groups are locally defined
• ldap_authorization (and ldap_auth) - groups are fetched from LDAP
• groups_provider_authorization - groups come from an external HTTP service
• jwt_auth (and ror_kbn_auth) - groups are extracted from JWT claims

Checking groups logic

In each authorization rule, we need to define what groups are eligible. You can use full group IDs (eg. management_depA) or group IDs with wildcards (eg. management_*). In the same place, you are defining the checking logic. At the moment ROR supports two of them:

• any of group IDs (or/and group ID patterns) should match (boolean OR logic - defined as groups or groups_or)
• all of group IDs (or/and group ID patterns) should match (boolean AND logic - defined as groups_and)

Example:

ldap_authorization:
  name: "LDAP_1"
  groups: ["group1", "group2", "group12*"] # match if in the obtained user's groups list there is one that equals `group1` OR equals `group2` OR matches the `group12*` pattern

ldap_authorization:
  name: "LDAP_1"
  groups_and: ["group*", "*depA"] # match if in the obtained user's groups list there is one that matches the `group*` pattern AND matches the `*depA` pattern at the same time