Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) Patterns

When managing access to resources within an application, it can be useful to group permissions into roles, and assign these roles to users. This is known as Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).

While there is no one way to implement RBAC, there are two types of relationships that must be considered in a roles system:

User-role relationships define what roles a user has. The relationship could be a direct assignment from user-to-role, but could also be an indirect relationship that depends on additional information.
Role-permission relationships define the access permissions that a role grants to a user. In Oso, permissions generally consist of an action and a resource.

Oso represents these relationships as rules in a policy file, written in our declarative logic programming language called Polar. In general, a policy specifies user-role relationships with user_in_role rules and role-permission relationships with role_allow rules. The general form of an allow rule that calls these rules looks like this:

allow(actor, action, resource) if
    user_in_role(actor, resource, role) and
    role_allow(role, action, resource);

Adding roles to your application?

Oso Roles provides built-in support for role configuration and more.

Check it out here!

Or, keep reading to learn how to model roles in Polar using your own existing roles data management.

The rest of this document explains how to implement these rules for the following RBAC use cases:

Global Roles: roles that apply to users and resources globally across the application
Roles in a multi-tenant application: roles that only apply to users and resources within a particular tenant
Role Hierarchies: more senior roles inherit permissions from less senior roles
Resource-specific roles: roles that only apply to a particular resource
Using roles with user groups: roles that apply to a group of users, rather than to an individual user
Implied roles: roles that are assigned to users implicitly by the data model, rather than directly assigned

Global Roles

“Global” roles refers to a single set of roles that applies to the entire application. Roles are not scoped to a particular domain, such as a tenant or a resource. Global roles are often useful in single-tenant applications that require a small set of roles

User-role mappings

Static mappings between users and roles can be specified in Polar. This avoids implementing user-role mappings in your application code but does mean that role assignments must be hardcoded for all users.

This example assumes that users are stored as a User model but can be represented by any object, including a simple string.

# Defining roles for users
user_in_role(user: User{username: "steve"}, "admin");
user_in_role(user: User{username: "leina"}, "admin");

# Assigning groups of users to the same role
user_in_role(user: User, "admin") if
    user.username in ["steve", "leina", "alex", "sam"];

To avoid hardcoding role assignments, which may be useful if you expect to assign new users to roles dynamically, you can store user-role assignments in your application and look up assignments in the policy:

# Get role assignment from user
user_in_role(user: User, role) if
    role = user.role;

Role-permission mappings

Role permissions are defined in Polar with role_allow rules. These are very similar to allow rules, but instead of taking an actor as the first argument, they take a role.

# Allow the admin role to take any action on any resource
role_allow("admin", _action, _resource);

# Allow the member role to read and write to any blog post
role_allow("member", action: String, _resource: BlogPost) if
    action in ["read", "write"];

Enabling roles

In order to use roles in your application, define an allow rule that uses the role logic you’ve defined:

# Allow rule to enable role checking
allow(actor: User, action, resource) if
    user_in_role(actor, role) and
    role_allow(role, action, resource);

With the allow rule defined, you can query it using Oso (the following example uses the Python library):

@app.route('/blog_post/<int:id>', methods=["GET"])
def get_blog_post(request):
    post = get_blog_post(id)
    if oso.is_allowed(request.user, "read", post):
        return post
    else:
        raise UnauthorizedRequest()

Roles in a multi-tenant application

In multi-tenant applications, roles are usually scoped to only apply to users and resources within a particular tenant.

One-to-many tenant-user and tenant-resource relationships

A straight-forward multi-tenant RBAC system has the following characteristics:

Users and resources can only belong to a single tenant
The same set of roles exists for all tenants
Roles have the same permissions for all tenants (e.g., admin in tenant_1 provides the same access control rights as it does in tenant_2, but users in tenant_1 cannot access resources in tenant_2).

A role model that meets the above characteristics is very similar to the model for Global Roles.

We can reuse the user_in_role and role_allow building blocks from Global Roles to create user-role and role-permission mappings. All that is required to scope roles to single tenants is to check tenancy in the allow rule that implements the role check:

# User-role mappings
user_in_role(User{username: "steve"}, "admin");
user_in_role(User{username: "leina"}, "admin");

# Role-permission mappings
# Admin can perform any action on any resource.
role_allow(role: "admin", _action, _resource);

# Allow rule to enable role checking with tenant scoping
allow(actor: User, action, resource) if
    actor.tenant = resource.tenant and
    user_in_role(actor, role) and
    role_allow(role, action, resource);

The above check will ensure that the user’s role will only apply to resources within the same tenant as the user. This model requires that the tenant is accessible on both user and resource objects.

Many-to-many tenant-user relationships

In some applications, users can belong to multiple tenants, and may have different roles in each tenant. An example of this is GitHub, where users can belong to multiple organizations and may have a different role in each organization.

User-role mappings

In this case, mapping users to roles actually becomes mapping users to roles and tenants. This can be done entirely in the policy with user_in_role_for_tenant rules. This approach avoids needing to store any role data in the application, but it does mean that role assignments are hardcoded for all users.

# Per-tenant user-role mappings
user_in_role_for_tenant(user: User{name: "leina"}, "admin", tenant_id: 1);
user_in_role_for_tenant(user: User{name: "leina"}, "member", tenant_id: 2);
user_in_role_for_tenant(user: User{name: "steve"}, "admin", tenant_id: 2);

To avoid hardcoding role assignments for users, the user-role-tenant assignments can be stored as application data. One implementation of this would be to store the roles on the user model. Since users can have different roles depending on the tenant, roles should be stored by tenant:

# Per-tenant user-role mappings, looked up from application data
user_in_role_for_tenant(user: User, role, tenant_id: Integer) if
    role in user.get_roles_by_tenant(tenant_id);

Role-permission mappings

As long as roles have the same permissions across all tenants, role_allow rules can be used to specify role-permission mappings, as with single-tenant roles.

# Allow the admin role to take any action on any resource
role_allow("admin", _action, _resource);

If roles have different permissions depending on the tenant, the role_allow rule can be modified to take the tenant as an argument:

# Allow the admin role for tenant 1 to take any action on Foo resources
role_allow_for_tenant("admin", _action, _resource: Foo, tenant_id: 1);

# Allow the admin role for tenant 2 to take any action on Bar resources
role_allow_for_tenant("admin", _action, _resource: Bar, tenant_id: 2);

Enabling roles

To enable the above rules, write an allow rule that calls user_in_role_for_tenant to get the relevant role, and then call role_allow. The tenant ID of the resource is used to look up the role to make sure that the role is associated with the same tenant as the resource the actor is trying to access.

# Allow rule to enable role checking with tenant scoping
allow(actor: User, action, resource) if
    user_in_role_for_tenant(actor, role, resource.tenant_id) and
    role_allow(role, action, resource);

Role Hierarchies

Role hierarchies represent a model where certain roles are senior to others. More senior roles inherit permissions from less senior roles. For example, an organization may have a “manager” role and a “programmer” role. The “manager” role is more senior than the “programmer”, and therefore it inherits the permissions of the “programmer” role in addition to its own permissions.

With roles represented as strings in Oso policies, role inheritance can be represented with the following structure:

# Grant a role permissions that it inherits from a more junior role
role_allow(role, action, resource) if
    inherits_role(role, junior_role) and
    role_allow(junior_role, action, resource);

# Managers inherit all permissions provided by the "programmer" role
inherits_role("manager", "programmer");

By adding the above role_allow rule, any role hierarchies declared with inherits_role rules will be enforced. Permissions should be assigned to roles directly using role_allow rules:

# Programmers can perform any action on any programming resource
role_allow("programmer", _action, _resource: ProgrammingResource);

# Managers can perform any action on any manager resource
role_allow("manager", _action, _resource: ManagerResource);

With these roles in place, users with the “manager” role will be able to take any action on both programming resources and manager resources.

Adding a new role to the hierarchy is very simple with this structure. For example, adding an “admin” role that inherits permissions from the “manager” role would require adding a single rule:

inherits_role("admin", "manager");

Multiple Inheritance

This role hierarchy structure supports multiple inheritance, meaning that a single role can inherit from multiple junior roles by adding more inherits_role rules. For example, there may be a “test_engineer” role that the “manager” also inherits permissions from. Simply adding another inherits_role for “manager” will implement this model.

inherits_role("manager", "test_engineer");

Resource-specific roles

When controlling access to more than one type of resource, it is often useful to use roles that specifically apply to one resource or another. For example, in a project management app there might be Project resources that have the following roles: “member”, “developer”, and “manager”.

If these roles are predefined, they generally will confer the same permissions across all Project resources, but the users assigned to the role will differ from project-to-project. In other words, the role-permission mappings are specific to the resource type, while the user-role mappings are specific to the resource instance.

In some cases, there may be roles that should confer permissions to all resources of a certain type.

This model can be implemented in Polar by implementing user_in_role_for_resource and role_allow rules, which are enabled with the following top-level allow rule:

allow(user, action, resource) if
    user_in_role_for_resource(user, role, resource) and
    role_allow(role, resource);

User-role mappings

Users are generally assigned a resource-specific role on a per-resource basis. A user could have the “member” role for Project 1 and the “admin” role for Project 2, and the user’s access would be different for each resource. Users can be mapped to roles on a per-resource basis in Polar by hardcoding the user-role-resource assignments:

# Assign leina the "member" role for Project 1
user_in_role_for_resource(
    user: User{name: "leina"},
    role: "member",
    project: Project{id: 1});

To avoid hardcoding the user-role-resource assignments, the assignments can be stored as application data and accessed from the policy.

There are a variety of ways to store these mappings in the application. The following rules show how the mapping might be accessed in different ways, depending on the mapping implementation:

# Get the user's role for a specific Project resource
# Roles are accessed by resource on the user object
user_in_role_for_resource(user: User, role, project: Project) if
    role = user.get_role_for_resource(project);

# Alternative to the above
# Users are accessed by role on the Project object
user_in_role_for_resource(user: User, role, project: Project) if
    user in project.get_members(role);

# Alternative to the above
# Roles are accessed by user on the Project object
user_in_role_for_resource(user: User, role, project: Project) if
    role = project.get_role(user);

Role-permission mappings

Scoping the permissions of a role to a single resource type is straightforward in Polar using rule specializers:

role_allow("member", "view", _resource: Project);

Resource Hierarchies/ Nested Resources

It is common for resources to be nested inside of other resources. To propagate access control through a resource hierarchy, it can be useful to use a role to grant access to the top-level resource and to infer permissions for nested resources based on that role. For example, there may be Document resources nested within the Project resource, and the Project “member” role should also grant certain kinds of access to documents within the project:

# Allow a user to "read" a document if they have the "member" role
# in the parent Project
allow(user, "read", doc: Document) if
    user_in_role(user, "member", doc.project);

# Alternative to the above
# User has the same role on a document that they have on the parent Project
user_in_role_for_resource(user: User, role, doc: Document) if
    user_in_role_for_resource(user, role, doc.Project);

# Allow members to "read" documents
role_allow("member", "read", _resource: Document);

Using roles with user groups

Assigning roles to user groups

Sometimes it is helpful to assign a role to a group of users rather than an individual user. A good example of this is GitHub. In GitHub, users within an Organization can be added to Teams. Roles can be assigned to teams instead of directly to users, and the access granted by a team-level role applies to all members of the team. For this example, let’s say that team-level roles are scoped to resources:

# Get the groups for a user
user_in_group(user, group) if
    group in user.teams;

# Assign a role to a group
group_in_role_for_resource(
    group: Team{name: "backend_team"},
    role: "owner",
    resource: Repository{name: "backend_repo"});

# Users inherit roles from their groups
user_in_role_for_resource(user, role, resource) if
    user_in_group(user, group) and
    group_in_role_for_resource(group, role, resource);

Roles within a hierarchy of groups

Applications often represent organization hierarchies by creating hierarchical user groups. For example, GitHub supports nested Teams. Recursive group_in_role rules can be used to propagate roles through a group hierarchy:

# Groups inherit roles from their parent groups
group_in_role_for_resource(group: Team, role, resource: Repository) if
    group_in_role_for_resource(group.parent_group, role, resource);

Implied roles

Sometimes it is convenient for user-role relationships to be implied rather than direct. For example, in GitHub’s permissions system, the user who owns an organization or repository is assigned the “admin” role for that resource by default.

Implied role assignments eliminate the need to keep direct user-role mappings up to date in the event that the data they depend on changes. E.g., if a repository changes ownership, the “admin” role should automatically be reassigned to the new owner.

This can be implemented in Polar by adding conditions to the body of user_in_role rules:

user_in_role_for_resource(user: User, "admin", resource: Repository) if
    user = resource.owner;

What's next

Learn how to set up roles via Oso Roles.
Check out our How-To Guides for more on using Polar policies for authorization.
Check out the Polar reference for more on the Polar language and syntax.

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