Table of Contents

Overview

The Fedora 4 Authentication and Authorization framework is designed to be flexible and extensible, to allow any organization to configure access to suit its needs.  The following sections explain the Fedora 4 AuthNZ framework, and provide instructions for configuring some out-of-the-box access controls.

For clarity's sake, a distinction is made between Authentication and Authorization:

• Authentication answers the question "who is the person, and how do I verify that they are who they say they are?"  Fedora 4 relies on the web servlet container to answer this question.
• Authorization answers the question, "does this person have permission to do what they want to do?".  Fedora 4 provides three different ways to answer this question:
  • Simple servlet container authentication.  Anyone who has authenticated through the web application container (Tomcat, Jetty, WebSphere, etc.) has permission to do everything – in effect all, authenticated users are superusers.
  • Basic Access Roles authorizations.  Authenticated users are mapped onto one or more preconfigured roles;  a user's role determines what they have permission to do.
  • XACML authorizations.  Policies created using the XACML framework are used to determine what operations are permissible to whom, using user and object properties exposed to the XACML engine.

Policy Enforcement Points

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