Sam - Identity and Access Management (IAM)

In a nutshell

The crux of IAM in Sam is a policy. A policy says who can do what to a thing. More technically the who is called a subject and can be a user or a group of users, the do what is called an action such as read or update, and the thing is called a resource such as a workspace or project. Resources have types which specify what actions are available for its resources, roles (which are collections of actions) and which role is the "owner" role. The "owner" role should have the appropriate actions to administer a resource. When a resource is created a policy with the owner role is automatically created and the creator is added.

Terms

• Subject - an authenticated user, group or policy (policies contain a set of subjects and can be treated as a group)
• Resource - something to which access is controlled
• Action - may be performed on a resource - meant to be as granular as possible
• Policy - represents the actions a set of subjects may perform on a resource
• Role - a collection of actions - meant to aggregate actions into a more meaningful, higher level concept
• Group - a group of subjects (this can include groups)
• Resource type - defines a class of resources. Each resource has a type which defines
  • Available actions
  • Available roles and actions for each role
  • Of the available roles which is the “owner” role - this is used make sure resources are not orphaned

Best Practices

• Use roles to aggregate actions into a more meaningful, higher level concept. Changing roles is a configuration change and affects all resources with that role, easy. Changing policies requires an api call or direct database updates and affects only the resource the policy is attached to, hard in bulk.
• Define actions to be as granular as possible. This allows for better composability of roles.
• Check only 1 action per api call. Complex checks involving multiple actions or even roles are code smells indicating poorly modeled access control. How a subject gets an action might be complicated (groups, hierarchy, etc.) but the action itself should be simple. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, such as apis that deal with more than one resource, but they should be a minority.

Design

Guiding Principles

There are no special/super users in this system. All api calls authenticate as subjects with access rights determined by policies in the same way. In other words, this system should use its own policy mechanisms internally for any authorization needs. (Note that this does leave the problem of bootstrapping, i.e. how is the first user created, which can be achieved by scripts outside the system with direct data store level access.) This system can be publicly facing. This does not mean that it will be in all cases but it should be designed with this in mind. Authentication is handled at a higher level than this application, e.g. via OAuth and an OIDC proxy.

Evaluation

Evaluation is the act of determining what a user may access.

1. Given a user, resource and action emit a yes or no response, i.e. can the user perform the action on the resource?
2. Given a user and a resource type, list all resources and associated roles the user has (directly or indirectly).
3. Given a user and resource, list all the actions the user may perform on that resource
4. Given a user and resource, list all the user’s roles on that resource

Of these 1 and 2 are the most important from a performance standpoint. Expect 1 to be called for almost every api call in a system. Expect 2 to be called from UI list pages where users generally want a snappy response. 2 and 4 should never be used to make access decisions because role definitions may change, they are for informational purposes only.

Resource and Policy Management

A resource may be part of a hierarchy of resources. A parent may be set on a resource. To do so, users must have the set_parent action on the resource and the add_child action on the would be parent. Ancestor resources in the hierarchy control permissions on all descendants.

A policy is specific to a resource and a resource may have multiple policies. Each policy consists of

• A set of subjects
• A set of actions directly applicable to the resource
• A set of roles directly applicable to the resource
• A set of descendant permissions - roles and actions applicable to descendant resources All of the subjects may perform all of the actions/roles in the policy. A policy may also be marked as public effectively meaning all users are members. Each policy has a name that is unique within a resource. Access to actions through policies is additive (i.e. the actions available to a user on a resource is an accumulation of all policies the user is a member of for that resource).

The “owner” role of a resource generally will include delete action and actions to control sharing but need not always (e.g. if a resource may never be deleted then an owner would not have delete permissions). The actions that make up the “owner” role are defined by the resource type.

Resource types define the set of available actions for all resources of that type. It also defines a set of roles and their associated actions. Roles are useful because it can be cumbersome to deal with granular actions and as a point of extensibility (when new actions are added to resource types, they can be added to roles as well, effectively adding the action to all resources with that role). Creating and maintaining resource types is achieved through configuration.

Public Policies

There are some cases where it is desirable to grant actions or roles to all authenticated users. For example, granting read-only access to public workspaces. In this case a policy can be created that has the appropriate actions or roles and set to public. Resources with public policies show up when listing resources for a user. For this reason it is not always desirable to allow everyone to make public policies. Again, the example is public workspaces. Public workspaces show up for everyone and should be curated.

To change a policy's public status the caller must be able to share the policy (either via alter_policies and share_policy::{policy_name} actions) and must have the set_public action on the resource resource_type_admin/{resource type name}. resource_type_admin is an internally created resource type. {resource type name} is for the resource containing the policy. Note that every resource type in sam has a resource of the same name of type resource_type_admin which is automatically created. When these resources are created they do not have owners, permissions must be granted via admin api calls.

User and Group Management

User - Create, enable, disable, get status. Disabled users should be rejected from any api calls. Enabling a user should reinstate any prior access.

Group - Create, delete, read, list, add/remove users and groups. Nested groups are supported. Groups are implemented as a resource type with admin and member roles and policies. There is an additional admin_notifier role and policy that is public by default which allows any authenticate user to request access to a group. Group admins can set public to false if desired.

Built In Actions

• read_policies - may read all policies of a resource
• alter_policies - may change any policy of a resource
• delete - may delete a resource
• share_policy::{policy name} - may add/remove members to/from specified policy of a resource
• read_policy::{policy name} - may read specified policy of a resource
• get_parent - may get a resource's parent
• set_parent - may set a resource's parent
• add_child - may add a child to a resource
• remove_child - may remove a child from a resource
• list_children - may list all of a resource's children

UML Model

UML Key for reference. Note that in this model Group is a Subject. This allows it to be used interchangeably with Users within policies.

ERD

The Sam schema can be viewed in sections: users in blue, groups in yellow, resources in orange, policies in green, and resource type configuration in purple. Both groups and resources have a hierarchical model (groups can contain groups and resources can have parents). To solve read-query performance issues these hierarchies are also stored in a flattened representation: sam_group_member_flat and sam_effective_* tables.

API

Sam APIs

Java Client Library

for sbt:

libraryDependencies += "org.broadinstitute.dsde.workbench" %% "sam-client" % "0.1-<git hash>"

where <git hash> is the first 7 characters of the commit hash of the HEAD of develop

Example Scala Usage:

import org.broadinstitute.dsde.workbench.client.sam.api.ResourcesApi
import org.broadinstitute.dsde.workbench.client.sam.ApiClient

class SamClient(samBasePath: String) {
  private def samResourcesApi(accessToken: String): ResourcesApi = {
    val apiClient = new ApiClient()
    apiClient.setAccessToken(accessToken)
    apiClient.setBasePath(samBasePath)
    new ResourcesApi(apiClient)
  }

  def checkResourceAction(token: String, samResourceType: String, samResource: String, action: String): Boolean = {
    val samResourceApi = samResourcesApi(token)
    samResourceApi.resourceAction(samResourceType, samResource, action)
  }
}

Cloud Integrations

Google

• Groups can be mirrored to google groups.
• Proxy groups - each user with access to google resources should have a google group known as a proxy. The proxy is 1-to-1 with the user and the user is member of the proxy. The proxy group should be used in place of the user in Google IAM policies and Google groups. Users should not be added directly. This allows easy enable and disable functionality by adding/removing users to their proxy groups. It also allows creation of service accounts that can act as the user (see pet service accounts below).
• Pet service accounts - Google Compute Engine requires a service account to run compute. Service account credentials are the default credentials on any GCE instance. This is the best way at this time to provide credentials to any processes running on a GCE instance. Pet service accounts correspond with 1 and only 1 user, are added to the user’s proxy group and can call system apis as the user. In this way a pet service account can act as the user in all respects that can be controlled by the system (resources outside control of the system need to be manually shared by the user with the proxy group).

Google integration requires

• a GSuite domain
• a project with a service account for the sam application
• service account with access to
  • create PubSub topics and subscriptions
  • admin google groups in GSuite domain
  • create service accounts and keys in desired projects (usually easiest to grant this at the org level)

Development

Required Tooling:

Java:

Make sure you have Java JDK 17 installed. Instructions for our recommended package can be found here

Docker

Docker is required for running Sam locally. Docker Desktop can be installed from here

This should also install the kubectl command, which is required for rendering configs for running Sam locally.

Scala:

Mac:

brew install scala

To build

Make sure git secrets is installed:

brew install git-secrets

Run minnie-kenny.sh with -f first time after git-clone to ensure git-secrets is run

./minnie-kenny.sh -f

Build jar:

./docker/build.sh jar

Build jar and docker image:

./docker/build.sh jar -d build

Running Sam Locally

Host alias

If you haven't already, add 127.0.0.1 local.dsde-dev.broadinstitute.org to /etc/hosts:

sudo sh -c "echo '127.0.0.1       local.dsde-dev.broadinstitute.org' >> /etc/hosts"

You can then start Sam against dev DBs or local DBs following the instructions below.

Get on the Broad VPN

You need to be on the non-split VPN to perform the next steps

Credentials

You'll need to authenticate with Google to run the kubectl commands. To run Sam locally, dev credentials are required.

gcloud container clusters get-credentials terra-dev --region us-central1-a --project broad-dsde-dev

If you don't have permissions, try authenticating using your Firecloud account.

Render secrets

You only have to do this once.

./render_config.sh

Source Environment Variables

source env/local.env
source src/main/resources/rendered/secrets.env

Spin Up a Local Postgres

sh docker/run-postgres.sh start

Spin Up a Local Proxy

sh docker/run-proxy.sh start

Run Sam!

You can use sbt, but sometimes it's easier to run from your IDE. To do so, just set up a run configuration as described in the debugging instructions and run it with IntelliJ

sbt run

Verify that local Sam is running

Status endpoint: https://local.dsde-dev.broadinstitute.org:50443/status

Swagger page: https://local.dsde-dev.broadinstitute.org:50443/#/

Human-Readable Logging

To make Sam output human-readable log messages instead of Stackdriver-compatible messages, add SAM_LOG_APPENDER=Console-Standard to your environment variables.

Debugging in IntelliJ

1. Install the EnvFile IntelliJ Plugin
2. Set up a new Application run configuration in IntelliJ:
   • 
3. Run it!

To run unit tests

Set up your environment

# Spin up a local postgres:
sh docker/run-postgres.sh start
# Make sure your `SBT_OPTS` are set:
export SBT_OPTS="-Dpostgres.host=localhost -Dpostgres.port=5432"
# Source test env vars
source env/test.env

Note: if you run Postgres in another way (i.e. you're running the Postgres Mac app), the unit tests will fail because they will look at that installation instead of the Docker container you've spun up. You can either specify a port when starting the Postgres Docker container or quit your Postgres client.

Run tests in sbt

sbt testOnly

Run tests in intellij

Set up ScalaTest Template:

You need to set some default VM parameters for ScalaTest run configurations. In IntelliJ, go to Run > Edit Configurations..., select ScalaTest under 🔧Templates, and add these VM parameters:

-Dpostgres.host=localhost -Dpostgres.port=5432

You'll also need to set up the EnvFile plugin to pull environment variables from env/test.env.

Then you can run unit tests within IntelliJ by clicking the green play button on a unit test.

Connecting to your local Postgres

In order to connect to your local postgres, open up the database tab, select the plus button at the top, data source, and click postgres.

From there, set the:

1. Host: localhost
2. Port: 5432
3. User: Check src/test/resources/reference.conf
4. Password: Check src/test/resources/reference.conf

Cleaning up after tests

#Stop your local postgres:
sh docker/run-postgres.sh stop

Debugging ScalikeJDBC

To view the SQL commands generated by ScalikeJDBC, set scalikejdbc.global.loggingSQLAndTime.enabled in src/test/resources/reference.conf to true

Environment Variable Fallback

To run Tests Independently of Postgres

To run integration tests

CONTRIBUTING.md

Smoke Tests

Sam includes smoke tests that can be run anywhere and test a running Sam instance on any network accessible host. See the Smoke Test README for more information.

Pact Contract Tests

See the Pact README for more information.