An answer to your common XACML dilemmas Asela Pathberiya Senior Software Engineer

Founded in 2005 by acknowledged leaders in XML, Web Services Technologies & Standards and Open Source Producing entire middleware platform 100% open source under Apache license Business model is to sell comprehensive support & maintenance for our products Venture funded by Intel Capital and Quest Software. Global corporation with offices in USA, UK & Sri Lanka 150+ employees and growing WSO2

What are we going to cover  What is XACML?  Why is XACML important for your organization?  What are the disadvantages of XACML?  How can WSO2 Identity Server help you to overcome those disadvantages?

ETag Group ETag group is a trading company, which is established in 2001.

Application System ETag group deployed their 1st Application System in 2005.

Authentication Application System included an authentication mechanism

Authentication Some functions and data in the Application System must not be accessed by all employees in the company. Therefore authentication is not enough..!!!

Authorization ETag group wanted to build an authorization logic for their Application System.

Role Based Access Control (RBAC) Set of people who has same set of privileges, put in to a role and assign permission for that role.

Role Based Access Control (RBAC)

Effect of company growth  No. of Application Systems were increased. For each application system, authorization logics were needed to implemented.  Authorization logics became more complex  Authorization logics were needed to be updated frequently  Maintaining of authorization logics became a tricky task Growth of ETag Group

Meeting Decided implement a new authorization system

ETag Common Authorization System (ECAS) Denis was asked to lead “ECAS” project “ECAS” project must fulfill following six requirements as decided in the board meeting.

Externalized Authorization system is not bound to an application. Each application must be able to query a single authorization system for all authorization queries

Policy based Authorization logics can be modified frequently without any source code changes.

Standardized Even business managers and external people must be aware of the technology which is used to design this.

Attribute Based "X resource can be accessed by the Users who are from etag.com domain and whose age is not less than 18 years old”

Fine-grained Need to achieve the fine grain without defining a large number of static combinations in the source code or database

Real Time “Can user, Bob transfer X amount from current account Y between 9.00am to 4.00pm”

 Externalized  Policy based  Standardized  Attribute based  Fine-grained  Dynamic Authorization Solution

XACML XACML is standard for eXtensible Access Control Markup Language

Standard which is ratified by OASIS standards organization The first meeting 21st March 2001 XACML OASIS Standard – 6 February 2003 XACML 1.1 – Committee Specification – 7th August 2003 XACML 2.0 – OASIS Standard – 1 February 2005 XACML 3.0 – OASIS Standard – 10th Aug 2010

Policy language implemented using XML

Externalization is provided by XACML Reference architecture

Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC)

Fine-grained authorization Fine-grained authorization with higher level of abstraction by means of policy sets policies and rules.

Real time evaluation

XACML Implementation for ECAS Denis was really happy as he found the solution for all requirements Denis thought to start to implement XACML based authorization system for ECAS project

Meeting “Denis, It is hard to implement a XACML solution from the scratch” “It is better to find an existing implementation and plug it in to ECAS project “

Meeting “We need a closer look on XACML... Let have a review on it”

Disadvantages Performances of XACML based authorization system would be less than the existing system Complexity of defining and managing XACML policies How to integrate current authorization logics in to new system as XACML policies. How to provide a standard interface to communicate with with PDP. PDP would be able to handle lager number of ( ) policies How to achieve reliability and High availability. Can XACML solutions support "What are the resources that Bob can access?"

XACML Implementations

An Open source XACML Implementation "Open source XACML solution, WSO2 identity Server, Just download and can run the PDP with out any configuration. how fast is that..? I do not want to write mail asking for evaluation copies" "I can just write simple XACML policy and try this out... Nice web based UI. "

WSO2 Identity Server

Performance bottleneck  There would be less performance than the traditional authorization systems.  It is a trade-off for the advantages, offered  But WSO2 Identity Server team has identify this performance bottleneck and has provided a solution to overcome this to a greater extent. Caching technologies Thrift protocol for PDP – PEP communication

Caching

Load Test Figures  Environment Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 2.53GHz processor, 4 GB RAM, OS - Debian 6.0 (64bit) - with a single instance of Identity Server [-Xms1024m -Xmx2024m -XX:MaxPermSize=1024m]  Policy Complexity L1: 10 rules per policy while one rule dealing with 1 attribute L2: 100 rules per policy while one rule dealing with more than 10 attributes  Requests one million XACML requests. XACML requests are randomly retrieved from a pool where different requests are available  Resources

Load Test Result - Caching

Load Test Result - Thrift

Complexity of defining and managing XACML policies Web based UI as PAP for defining and managing XACML policies.

XACML Policy Editors Two policy editors, Basic and Advance.

Integrating current authorization logics

Standard interface for PDP and PAP All PDP and PAP functionality has been exposed as Web services

Handling large number of policies  Policy distribution  On demand Policy Loading

Reliability and High Availability PDP clustering

Listing entitled resources for user

What we discussed Today  Identified XACML as a standard way of implementing authorization  How XACML answers the authorization requirements of your organization  What are the negative points of XACML  How WSO2 Identity Server has provided an answer for them

References

Q and A

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