Chapter 14. Managing Certificate System Users and Groups

This chapter explains how to set up authorization for access to the administrative, agent services, and end-entities pages.

14.1. About Authorization

Authorization is the process of allowing access to certain tasks associated with the Certificate System. Access can be limited to allow certain tasks to certain areas of the subsystem for certain users or groups and different tasks to different users and groups.
Users are specific to the subsystem in which they are created. Each subsystem has its own set of users independent of any other subsystem installed. The users are placed in groups, which can be predefined or user-created. Privileges are assigned to a group through access control lists (ACLs). There are ACLs associated with areas in the administrative console, agent services interface, and end-entities page that perform an authorization check before allowing an operation to proceed. Access control instructions (ACIs) in each of the ACLs are created that specifically allow or deny possible operations for that ACL to specified users, groups, or IP addresses.
The ACLs contain a default set of ACIs for the default groups that are created. These ACIs can be modified to change the privileges of predefined groups or to assign privileges to newly-created groups.
Authorization goes through the following process:
  1. The users authenticate to the interface using either the Certificate System user ID and password or a certificate.
  2. The server authenticates the user either by matching the user ID and password with the one stored in the database or by checking the certificate against one stored in the database. With certificate-based authentication, the server also checks that the certificate is valid and finds the group membership of the user by associating the DN of the certificate with a user and checking the user entry. With password-based authentication, the server checks the password against the user ID and then finds the group membership of the user by associating that user ID with the user ID contained in the group.
  3. When the user tries to perform an operation, the authorization mechanism compares the user ID of the user, the group in which the user belongs, or the IP address of the user to the ACLs set for that user, group, or IP address. If an ACL exists that allows that operation, then the operation proceeds.