Policy Default Refresh¶
Role Based Access Control (RBAC) policies in OpenStack has long been the forefront of operator concerns and pain. The implementation is complicated to understand, inconsistent across projects, and lacks secure defaults. To improve the existing default policy of OpenStack, the Consistent_and_Secure_Default_Policies_Popup_Team 1 was built up to track policy refresh for all projects, where Keystone was the lead. Keystone defined ongoing policy goals and roadmaps, default roles, as well as a reclarification of system-scoped and project-scoped RBAC. As a member of this popup_team, Cyborg is also going to follow up policy default refresh.
Problem description¶
The current default policy in Cyborg is incomplete and not good enough. Since Cyborg V2 API is newly implemented in Train, RBAC check for V2 API still remains incomplete. And now Cyborg mainly has three policy rules:
allow
admin_only
admin_or_owner
Firstly “allow” means any access will be passed. Now “allow” rule is used by cyborg:arq:create, which is too slack. We’ve reached an agreement that this should not be open for all users 2. As for the new rule, please see that in the cyborg policy table introduced in Use Cases part.
Secondly “admin_only” is used for the global admin that is able to make almost
any change to cyborg, and see all details of the cyborg system.
The rule actually passes for any user with an admin role, it doesn’t matter
which project is used, any user with the admin role gets this global
access.
Thirdly “admin_or_owner” sounds like it checks if the user is a member of a project. However, for most APIs we use the default target which means this rule will pass for any authenticated user.
With all the above policy rules, there still some cases which are not well covered. For example, it is impossible to allow a user to retrieve/update devices which are shared by multiple projects from a system level without being given the global admin role. In addition, cyborg now doesn’t have a “reader” role.
Keystone comes with member, admin and reader roles by default. We can use these default roles: https://specs.openstack.org/openstack/keystone-specs/specs/keystone/rocky/define-default-roles.html
In addition, we can use the new “system scope” concept to define which users are system administrators: https://specs.openstack.org/openstack/keystone-specs/specs/keystone/queens/system-scope.html
Use Cases¶
The following user roles should be supported by cyborg default configuration:
Add System Scoped Admin: to operate system-level resources
Add System Scoped Reader: read-only role for system-level resources
Add Project Scoped Reader: read-only role for project-level resources
Refresh existed admin to Project Scoped Admin by default
Add Project Scoped Member: role for project-level non-admin APIs
Cyborg V2 APIs need RBAC check. Objects of V2 APIs are listed in the following:
device_profile 3, as the “flavor” in accelerator request, is generally supposed to be a system-level resource especially for public cloud, where billing is based on the device_profile. So we reached an agreement 4 that sys_admin is required for device_profile:create and delete. As for other specific cloud, such as private cloud providers, they can change the policy by themselves if they want other users to create device_profiles.
devices and deployables 5 objects are used to describe hardware accelerators, where a device refers to the hardware and deployables are derived from a device. device:update API is introduced for sys_admin to enable or disable a specific device, while deployable:update API offers project_admin a way to update the shell image/FPGA bitstream to custom user logic for the specified deployable. NOTE that sys_admin is required to do the pre_configuration for devices.
accelerator_requests are sent by nova to bind/unbind accelerators to VMs during instance boot. Any project user who can create VM should be able to create an arq, so “member” role is required for arq:create. And for the arq:patch and arq:delete admin_or_owner should make sense.
To be clear, the roles needed for all Cyborg V2 APIs’ operations are defined in the table cyborg-policy-table.
In introducing the above new default permissions, we must ensure:
Operators using default policy are given at least one cycle to add additional roles to users (likely via implied roles)
Operators with over-ridden policy are given at least one cycle to understand how the new defaults may or may not help them
Proposed change¶
According to the discussions above, we will try to make the changes as less as possible to meet the requirements. For the current stage, there should be at least the following changes. Each policy rules will be covered with appropriate oslo.policy’s “scope_types”, ‘system’ and ‘project’ in cyborg case. And we will use the DocumentedRuleDefault to update policy and follow the oslo.policy deprecation workflow, where both old and new policy check strings are active during the deprecation period.
Add system scoped admin policy
This policy will be useful for situations where devices are shared by multiple projects, and we want a system-level admin to operator the devices like programming or firmware upgrade. In addition, a system admin is required to do the service disable/enable things.
Add system scoped reader policy
This policy will be useful for situations where a read-only role is required for a more secure access to devices that are shared by multiple projects in a system.
Add project scoped reader policy
Similarly, this policy will be useful for situations where a read-only role is required for a more secure access at a project level. For example, some users should only have the permission to check and use the resources but shouldn’t update the resources.
Add project scoped member policy
This policy will be used to check if a user is eligible to post a non-admin API such as arq creation.
POC: https://review.opendev.org/#/c/699102/, https://review.opendev.org/#/c/700765/
Alternatives¶
Keep the old policy mechanism, but on one hand, as more apis features added, the policy check will become more complicated, on the other hand, there are some important situations which are not covered or well-covered by old policy mechanism. This refresh will make cyborg policy basically comprehensive and clean.
Data model impact¶
None
REST API impact¶
Operations for each API should be reassessed and associated which scope, or scopes are appropriate.
The following new roles will be added to replace legacy policies, more details can be found in the aforementioned cyborg-policy-table:
Project Reader check
GET /v2/device_profiles
GET /v2/device_profiles/{device_profiles_uuid}
GET /v2/accelerator_requests
GET /v2/accelerator_requests/{accelerator_request_uuid}
System Reader check
GET /v2/devices
GET /v2/devices/{device_uuid}
System Admin check
PATCH /v2/devices
POST /v2/device_profil
DELETE /v2/device_profiles/{device_profiles_uuid}
DELETE /v2/device_profiles?value={dev_profile_name1},{dev_profile_name2}
Project Admin check
PATCH /v2/deployables/{uuid}
Project Member check
POST /v2/accelerator_requests
PATCH /v2/accelerator_requests/{arq_uuid}
DELETE /v2/accelerator_requests?arqs={arq_uuid}
DELETE /v2/accelerator_requests?instance={instance_uuid}
Note
The default roles discussed will be created by Keystone, during the bootstrap
process, using implied roles.
As indicated in the above list, having admin role implies a user also
has the same rights as the member role. Therefore this user will also has
the same rights as the reader role as member implies reader.
This keeps policy files clean. For example, the following are equivalent as a result of implied roles:
“cyborg:device:get_all”: “role:reader OR role:member OR role:admin” “cyborg:device:get_all”: “role:reader”
The chain of implied roles will be documented alongside of the policy-in-code defaults in addition to general Keystone documentation updates noting as much.
Security impact¶
Policy defaults refresh will help keep the system secure.
Notifications impact¶
None
Other end user impact¶
None
Performance Impact¶
None
Other deployer impact¶
Deployers will need to look through the new policies (communicated via release notes) to make sure they can adopt them.
Developer impact¶
New APIs must add policies that follow the new pattern.
Implementation¶
Assignee(s)¶
- Primary assignee:
<yumeng-bao>
Work Items¶
In order to make sure existed policies run normally when every changes happen, we will follow the 6 and propose changes in the following order:
Add new roles to cyborg policy including Project-Reader, Project-Member, System-Reader, System-Admin.
Update APIs and unit tests that are using the above new roles.
Update APIs and unit tests that are using other roles such as Project-Admin, Admin_or_user etc.
Refactor cyborg policy file.
Dependencies¶
None
Testing¶
Tests for policy rules and APIs should be added. Reference RBAC test in keystone-tempest-plugin: https://review.opendev.org/#/c/686305/
Documentation Impact¶
API Reference should be kept consistent with any policy changes, in particular around the default reader role.
References¶
History¶
Optional section intended to be used each time the spec is updated to describe new design, API or any database schema updated. Useful to let reader understand what’s happened along the time.
Release Name |
Description |
|---|---|
Ussuri |
Introduced |
