AuthZForce Server (Community Edition)

AuthZForce Server provides a multi-tenant RESTful API to Policy Administration Points (PAP) and Policy Decision Points (PDP) as defined in the OASIS XACML 3.0 standard.

AuthZForce Server is also the Reference Implementation (GEri) of FIWARE Authorization PDP Generic Enabler (GE). More info on the FIWARE catalogue. The manuals are available as downloadable HTML/PDF from the releases page, or online on readthedocs.org.

If you are interested in using an embedded XACML-compliant PDP in your Java applications, AuthZForce also provides a PDP engine as a Java library in Authzforce core project.

Note for contributers: The sources for the manuals are located in fiware repository.

Features

PDP (Policy Decision Point)

• Compliance with the following OASIS XACML 3.0 standards:
  • XACML v3.0 Core standard: all mandatory and optional features are supported, except:
    • Elements AttributesReferences, MultiRequests and RequestReference;
    • Functions urn:oasis:names:tc:xacml:3.0:function:xpath-node-equal, urn:oasis:names:tc:xacml:3.0:function:xpath-node-match and urn:oasis:names:tc:xacml:3.0:function:access-permitted;
    • Algorithms planned for future deprecation.
  • XACML v3.0 Core and Hierarchical Role Based Access Control (RBAC) Profile Version 1.0
  • XACML v3.0 Multiple Decision Profile Version 1.0 - Repeated attribute categories (urn:oasis:names:tc:xacml:3.0:profile:multiple:repeated-attribute-categories).
  • Experimental support for:
    • XACML Data Loss Prevention / Network Access Control (DLP/NAC) Profile Version 1.0: only dnsName-value datatype and dnsName-value-equal function are supported;
    • XACML 3.0 Additional Combining Algorithms Profile Version 1.0: on-permit-apply-second policy combining algorithm;
    • XACML v3.0 Multiple Decision Profile Version 1.0 - Requests for a combined decision (urn:oasis:names:tc:xacml:3.0:profile:multiple:combined-decision).
• Detection of circular XACML policy references (PolicySetIdReference);
• Control of the maximum XACML PolicySetIdReference depth;
• Control of the maximum XACML VariableReference depth;
• Optional strict multivalued attribute parsing: if enabled, multivalued attributes must be formed by grouping all AttributeValue elements in the same Attribute element (instead of duplicate Attribute elements); this does not fully comply with XACML 3.0 Core specification of Multivalued attributes (§7.3.3), but it usually performs better than the default mode since it simplifies the parsing of attribute values in the request;
• Optional strict attribute Issuer matching: if enabled, AttributeDesignators without Issuer only match request Attributes without Issuer (and same AttributeId, Category...); this option is not fully compliant with XACML 3.0, §5.29, in the case that the Issuer is indeed not present on a AttributeDesignator; but it is the recommended option when all AttributeDesignators have an Issuer (the XACML 3.0 specification (5.29) says: If the Issuer is not present in the attribute designator, then the matching of the attribute to the named attribute SHALL be governed by AttributeId and DataType attributes alone.);
• Extensibility points:
  • Attribute Datatypes: you may extend the PDP engine with custom XACML attribute datatypes;
  • Functions: you may extend the PDP engine with custom XACML functions;
  • Combining Algorithms: you may extend the PDP engine with custom XACML policy/rule combining algorithms;
  • Attribute Providers: you may plug custom attribute providers into the PDP engine to allow it to retrieve attributes from other attribute sources (e.g. remote service) than the input XACML Request during evaluation;
  • Request Filter: you may customize the processing of XACML Requests before evaluation by the PDP core engine (e.g. used for implementing XACML v3.0 Multiple Decision Profile Version 1.0 - Repeated attribute categories);
  • Result Filter: you may customize the processing of XACML Results after evaluation by the PDP engine (e.g. used for implementing XACML v3.0 Multiple Decision Profile Version 1.0 - Requests for a combined decision);

PAP (Policy Administration Point)

• Policy management: create/read/update/delete multiple policies and references from one to another (via PolicySetIdReference)
• Policy versioning: create/read/delete multiple versions per policy.
• Configurable root policy ID/version: top-level policy enforced by the PDP may be any managed policy (if no version defined in configuration, the latest available is selected)
• Configurable maximum number of policies;
• Configurable maximum number of versions per policy.
• Optional policy version rolling (when the maximum of versions per policy has been reached, oldest versions are automatically removed to make place).

REST API

• Defined in standard Web Application Description Language and XML schema so that you can automatically generate client code.
• Provides access to all PAP/PDP features mentioned in previous sections.
• Multi-tenant: allows to have multiple domains/tenants, each with its own PAP/PDP, in particular its own policy repository.
• Conformance with REST Profile of XACML v3.0 Version 1.0 (at the level of each domain) except for test urn:oasis:names:tc:xacml:3.0:profile:rest:assertion:home:pdp (to be fixed in next release)
• Fast Infoset support for requests/responses.

High availability and load-balancing

• Integration with file synchronization tools (e.g. csync2) or distributed filesystems (e.g. NFS and CIFS) to build clusters of AuthZForce Servers.