How To Bypass Authorization

Running Fedora without authorization means that the REST API is available to any request coming from the container and lacks any finer-grained security. This is useful when Fedora is running behind another application that connects to Fedora and implements its own security checks. In addition, this configuration is useful for temporary demonstrations and for running software tests that do not require security.

This configuration does not preclude the use of container authentication to secure Fedora. However, container roles are not used for any further authorization within Fedora. All requests are treated as superusers.

The security bypass for REST endpoint is accomplished by supplying an alternate ModeShape authentication provider for servlet credentials. This servlet authentication provider permits all actions at the modeshape level and does not use a PEP (Policy Enforcement Point).

Step-by-Step:

1. If you previously configured a PEP, open your repo.xml file and remove any beans that are instances of "org.fcrepo.auth.common.ServletContainerAuthenticationProvider".
2. Also remove the PEP bean, if one was configured.
3. Remove the depends-on attribute on the modeshapeRepofactory bean, if there is one.
4. Open your repository.json file
5. Under security, configure the "BypassSecurityServletAuthenticationProvider", as shown in the example below.

Example repository.json (security section)

"security" : {
  "anonymous" : {
    "roles" : ["readonly","readwrite","admin"],
    "useOnFailedLogin" : false
  },
  "providers" : [
    { "classname" : "org.fcrepo.auth.commons.BypassSecurityServletAuthenticationProvider" }
  ]
},