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access control models

XAC access control and authorization model word salad.

Authz Authorization and access control

For context: there are resources (things that can be accessed), and subjects (things that do the accessing). Resources may be grouped together (e.g. all files in a directory), Subjects may be grouped together (e.g. all users with a particular job title).

DAC Discretionary Access Control

DAC doesn't really say much about how access control is defined, it just means that if a subject has a certain level of access to a resource, it can be passed on to a different subject. Like an owner manage the permissions of a resource.

MAC Mandatory Access Control

Like DAC, MAC also doesn't say much about how access control is defined, more that every action is checked against some set of rules/policies.

ACL Access Control Lists

We start with the most simple of models: each resource has a list of subjects and their allowed permissions.

It could get fancier where the subjects are instead groups of subjects, and we get RBAC.

RBAC Role Based Access Control

Like mentioned in ACLs, RBAC defines permissions based on groups of subjects, where the groups a preferably defined as a deeper level of who they are, rather than what they're trying to do (so groups like: Active Oncall vs Database Editors).

ReBAC Relationship Based Access Control

If you think about the above, everything is built on relations (user is a member of a group, file is a member of a directory, group is editor of a directory, etc.). So we get ReBAC, where you describe everything in terms of relations to each other, and a permission check is a graph search to see if a resource is reachable through various relations from a subject.

Most of the more complicated RBAC systems appear to be based on ReBAC, but are presented to users as RBAC in combination with constraints on the resource side.

ABAC Attribute Based Access Control

We can look at more than just who the subject is, this is ABAC: extra information is attached as attributes to the subject, the resource, the check itself, and the execution environment, and all of it is used to determine a pass/fail for a permission check.

Sometimes, vendors call it PBAC Policy Based Access Control, but it's just an emphasis on the policy vs the attributes the policy looks at.

We see RBAC/ReBAC systems growing ABAC features, like GCP IAM Conditions, AWS IAM Conditions, Authzed/SpiceDB Caveats.