[Freeipa-devel] [DESIGN][UPDATE] Time-Based HBAC Policies

[Stanislav Laznicka]

On 08/12/2016 06:48 PM, Petr Spacek wrote:
> On 11.8.2016 12:34, Stanislav Laznicka wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I updated the design of the Time-Based HBAC Policies according to the
>> discussion we led here earlier. Please check the design page
>> http://www.freeipa.org/page/V4/Time-Based_Account_Policies. The biggest
>> changes are in the Implementation and Feature Management sections. I also
>> added a short How to Use section.
Thank you for the review! I will add some comments inline.
> Nice page!
>
> On the high level it all makes sense.
>
> ad LDAP schema
> ==============
> 1) Why accessTime attribute is MAY in ipaTimeRule object class?
> Does it make sense to have the object without accessTime? I do not think so.
My idea was that we allow users prepare a few time rule objects before 
filling them with the actual times.
> Also, it could be good to add description attribute to the object class and
> incorporate it into commands (including find).
>
Definitely a good idea, I will work that in.
> 2) Besides all this, I spent few minutes in dark history of IPA. The
> accessTime attribute was introduced back in 2009 in commit
> "55ba300c7cb59cf05b16cc01281f51d93eb25acf" aka "Incorporate new schema for IPAv2".
>
> The commit does not contain any reasoning for the change but I can see that
> the attribute is already used as MAY in old object classes ipaHBACRule and
> ipaSELinuxUserMap.
>
> Is any of these a problem?
I believe that the accessTime attribute was originally brought to IPA 
when there was an implementation of time policies for HBAC objects and 
it's been rotting there ever since those capabilities were removed. We 
may eventually use a new attribute for storage of the time strings as 
accessTime by definition is multi-valued which is not what's currently 
desired (although we may end up with it some day in the future). 
However, I don't think any other use of accessTime should be a problem 
as it's been obsoleted for a long time.
> Why is it even in ipaSELinuxUserMap object class?
I'm sorry to say I have no idea. I used it for what it originally was - 
a means for storing time strings at HBAC rules.
> Commit
> 55512dc938eb4a9a6655e473beab587e340af55c does not mention any reason for doing so.
>
> I cannot see any other problem so the low-level stuff is good and can be
> implemented.
>
>
> ad User interface
> =================
> We need to polish the user interface so it really usable.
>
> At least the web interface should contain some shortcuts. E.g. when I'm adding
> a new HBAC rule, the "time" section should contain also "something" to
> immediately add new time rule so I do not need to go to time rules first and
> then go back to HBAC page.
>
> Similarly, dialog for rule modification should allow to easily change all the
> values, warn if time rules is shared, and also have an easy way to
> 'disconnect' the time rule, i.e. make a copy of it and edit only the new copy
> (instead of the shared original).
>
> All these are user interface things not affecting the low-level stuff.
>
>
> Maybe you should sat down with some UX designer, talk about these cases and
> draw some hand-made pictures.
I will add Pavel V. to CC, we may want to discuss this.
> I do not believe that this will require any changes in schema so you can
> polish SSSD and framework implementation in meantime.
>
> On the link below is a PROTOTYPE-patched FreeIPA that covers most of the CLI
> functionality (except for the creation of iCalendar strings from options) for
> better illustration of the design.
>
> https://github.com/stlaz/freeipa/tree/timerules_2
> Honestly I did not look at the code today :-)
>
> Overall, I'm glad to see current proposal. After so many iteration, we reached
> something which does not have any glaring problem :-)
It definitely felt better to be writing it with all the previous 
knowledge. Thank you! :-)