[SOLR-7275] Pluggable authorization module in Solr

• Type: Sub-task
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 5.2
• Assignee: Anshum Gupta
• Reporter: Anshum Gupta
• Created: 20/Mar/15 00:15
• Updated: 29/Oct/16 19:35
• Resolved: 29/May/15 17:27

Description

Solr needs an interface that makes it easy for different authorization systems to be plugged into it. Here's what I plan on doing:

Define an interface SolrAuthorizationPlugin with one single method isAuthorized. This would take in a SolrRequestContext object and return an SolrAuthorizationResponse object. The object as of now would only contain a single boolean value but in the future could contain more information e.g. ACL for document filtering etc.

The reason why we need a context object is so that the plugin doesn't need to understand Solr's capabilities e.g. how to extract the name of the collection or other information from the incoming request as there are multiple ways to specify the target collection for a request. Similarly request type can be specified by qt or /handler_name.

Flow:
Request -> SolrDispatchFilter -> isAuthorized(context) -> Process/Return.

public interface SolrAuthorizationPlugin {
  public SolrAuthorizationResponse isAuthorized(SolrRequestContext context);
}

public  class SolrRequestContext {
  UserInfo; // Will contain user context from the authentication layer.
  HTTPRequest request;
  Enum OperationType; // Correlated with user roles.
  String[] CollectionsAccessed;
  String[] FieldsAccessed;
  String Resource;
}

public class SolrAuthorizationResponse {
  boolean authorized;

  public boolean isAuthorized();
}

User Roles:

• Admin
• Collection Level:
• Query
• Update
• Admin

Using this framework, an implementation could be written for specific security systems e.g. Apache Ranger or Sentry. It would keep all the security system specific code out of Solr.

Issue Links

• depends upon: SOLR-7484 Refactor SolrDispatchFilter to move all Solr specific implementation to another class
• Is contained by: SOLR-7236 Securing Solr (umbrella issue)
• is related to: SOLR-7402 A default/OTB plugin authorization module in Solr