User Management¶

Info

User management in WSO2 Streaming Integrator has the following features,

The concept of single user store, which is either local or external.
File based user store as the default embedded store.
Ability to connect to an external Identity Provider using SCIM2 and OAuth2 protocols.
Ability to extend user authentication as per the scenario

Introduction to user management¶

User management is a mechanism which involves defining and managing users, roles and their access levels in a system. A user management dashboard or console provides system administrators a holistic view of a system's active user sessions, their log-in statuses, the privileges of each user and their activity in the system, enabling the system administrators to make business-critical, real-time security decisions. A typical user management implementation involves a wide range of functionality such as adding/deleting users, controlling user activity through permissions, managing user roles, defining authentication policies, managing external user stores, manual/automatic log-out, resetting user passwords etc.

Any user management system has users, roles, user stores and user permissions as its basic components .

Users¶

Users are consumers who interact with your organizational applications, databases or any other systems. These users can be a person, a device or another application/program within or outside of the organization's network. Since these users interact with internal systems and access data, the need to define which user is allowed to do what is critical to most security-conscious organizations. This is how the concept of user management developed.

Permission¶

A permission is a 'delegation of authority' or a 'right' assigned to a user or a group of users to perform an action on a system. Permissions can be granted to or revoked from a user/user group/user role automatically or by a system administrator. For example, if a user has the permission to log-in to a system , then the permission to log-out is automatically implied without the need of granting it specifically.

User Roles¶

A user role is a consolidation of several permissions. Instead of associating permissions with a user, administrator can associate permissions with a user role and assign the role to users. User roles can be reused throughout the system and prevents the overhead of granting multiple permissions to each and every user individually.

User Store¶

A user store is a persistent storage where information of the users and/or user roles is stored. User information includes log-in name, password, fist name, last name, e-mail etc. It can be either file based or a database maintained within WSO2 Streaming Integrator or externally to it. User stores used in WSO2 Streaming Integrator differs based on the interface(IdP Client) used to interact with the user store. By default, a file based user store maintained in the <SI_HOME>>/conf/server/deployment.yaml file interfaced through 'Local' IdP Client is enabled.

User Management via the IdP Client Interface¶

In WSO2 Streaming Integrator, user management is carried out through the Identity Provider Client (IdP Client) interface that can be switched as required for the user scenario. Furthermore, a custom IdP Client can be written to encompass the required user store connection and authentication.

IdP clients can be switched by specifying the required IdP client in the auth.configs: section in the <SI_HOME>/conf/server/deployment.yaml file.

    auth.configs:
      # Type of the IdP Client used for the user authentication
      type: local

The active IdP client is local by default.

Following are the IdP Clients available for WSO2 Streaming Integrator:

Local IdP Client
External IdP Client

Local IdP Client¶

The local IdP Client interacts with the file-based user store that is defined in the <SI_HOME>/conf/server/deployment.yaml file under the auth.configs namespace as follows:

    auth.configs:
      type: 'local'
      userManager:
        adminRole: admin
        userStore:
          users:
           -
             user:
               username: admin
               password: YWRtaW4=
               roles: 1
          roles:
           -
             role:
               id: 1
               displayName: admin

The above user and role is added by default.

Parameters¶

The parameters used in the above configurations are as follows:

Note

If new users/roles are added and the above default user and role are also needed, the following parameters must be added to the user store along with the added user/role.

Parameter	Default Value	Description
`userManager > adminRole`	`admin`	The name of the role that has administration privileges.
`userManager > userStore >` `users > user > username`	`admin`	The username of the user.
`userManager > userStore >` `users > user > password`	`YWRtaW4=`	The Base64(UTF-8) encrypted password of the user.
`userManager > userStore >` `users > user > roles`	`1`	A comma separated list of the IDs of the roles assigned to the user.
`userManager > userStore >` `roles > role > id`	1	The unique ID for the role.
userManager > userStore > roles > role > admin	admin	The name of the role.

Furthermore, Local IdP Client functionality can be controlled via the properties defined in the <SI_HOME>/conf/server/deployment.yaml file under the auth.configs namespace as shown below.

    auth.configs:
      type: local
      properties:
        sessionTimeout: 3600
        refreshSessionTimeout: 86400

The following are the properties that can be configured for the local IdP provider:

Property	Default Value	Description
`properties > sessiontimeout`	`3600`	The number of seconds for which the session is valid once the user logs in. Info The value specified here needs to be greater than 60 seconds because the system checks the user credentials and keeps extending the session every minute until the session timeout is reached.
`properties > refreshSessionTimeout`	`86400`	The number of seconds for which the refresh token used to extend the session is valid.

The complete default configuration of the local IdP Client is as follows:

    auth.configs:
      type: 'local'
      properties:
        sessionTimeout: 3600
        refreshSessionTimeout: 86400
      userManager:
        adminRole: admin
        userStore:
          users:
           -
             user:
               username: admin
               password: YWRtaW4=
               roles: 1
          roles:
           -
             role:
               id: 1
               displayName: admin

External IdP Client¶

External IdP Client authenticates users by interacting with an external identity provider via OAuth2 and SCIM2 protocols. The user store is maintained by the external identity provider. WSO2 Streaming Integrator authenticates by requesting an access token from the identity provider using the password grant type.

Note

The identity provider with which WSO2 Streaming Integrator interacts with to authenticate users must be started before the Streaming Integrator server.

The auth manager must be configured under the auth.configs namespace as shown below:

    auth.configs:
      type: external
      authManager:
        adminRole: admin

The parameters used in the above configurations areas follows:

Parameter	Default Value	Description
`userManager > adminRole`	`admin`	The name of the role that has administration privileges.

Furthermore, external IdP client functionality can be controlled via the properties defined in the <SI_HOME>/conf/<PROFILE>/deployment.yaml file under the auth.configs namespace as shown below.

    auth.configs:
     type: external
     properties:
      kmDcrUrl: https://localhost:9443/identity/connect/register
      kmTokenUrl: https://localhost:9443/oauth2
      kmUsername: admin
      kmPassword: admin
      idpBaseUrl: https://localhost:9443/scim2
      idpUsername: admin
      idpPassword: admin
      portalAppContext: portal
      statusDashboardAppContext: monitoring
      businessRulesAppContext : business-rules
      databaseName: WSO2_OAUTH_APP_DB
      cacheTimeout: 900
      baseUrl: https://localhost:9643
      grantType: password

The following are the properties that can be configured for the external IdP provider:

Property	Default Value	Description
kmDcrUrl	`https://localhost:9443/identity/connect/register`	The Dynamic Client Registration (DCR) endpoint of the key manager in the IdP.
`dcrAppOwner`	`kmUsername`
`kmTokenUrl`	`https://localhost:9443/oauth2`	The token endpoint of the key manager in the IdP.
`kmUsername`	`admin`	The username for the key manager in the IdP.
`kmPassword`	`admin`	The password for the key manager in the IdP.
`idpBaseUrl`	`https://localhost:9443/scim2`	The SCIM2 endpoint of the IdP.
`idpUsername`	`admin`	The username for the IdP.
`idpPassword`	`admin`	The password for the IdP.
`portalAppContext`	`portal`	The application context of the Dashboard Portal application in WSO2 Streaming Integrator.
`statusDashboardAppContext`	`monitoring`	The application context of the Status Dashboard application in WSO2 Streaming Integrator.
`businessRulesAppContext`	`business-rules`	The application context of the Business Rules application in WSO2 Streaming Integrator.
`databaseName`	`WSO2_OAUTH_APP_DB`	The name of the wso2.datasource used to store the OAuth application credentials
`cacheTimeout`	`900`	The cache timeout for the validity period of the token in seconds.
`baseUrl`	`https://localhost:9643`	The base URL to which the token should be redirected after the code returned from the Authorization Code grant type is used to get the token.
`grantType`	`password`	The grant type used in the OAuth application token request.
`spClientId/ portalClientId/` `statusDashboardClientId/ businessRulesClientId`	N/A	The client ID of the OAuth App. If no value is specified for this property, the DCR is called to register the application and persist the client ID in the data store.
`spClientId/ portalClientId/` `statusDashboardClientId/ businessRulesClientId`	N/A	The client secret of the OAuth application. If no value is specified for this property, the DCR is called to register the application and persist the client secret in the data store.

Writing custom IdP Client¶

When writing a custom IdP client, the following two interfaces must be implemented:

IdPClientFactory : This is a factory OSGi service that initializes the custom IdP client using the properties from IdPClientConfiguration.
IdPClient : An interface with functions to provide user authentication and retrieval by the other services.