Roles are named and can express the same bundle of permissions that can
currently be assigned to a Token (lists of Policies and Service
Identities). The difference with a Role is that it not itself a bearer
token, but just another entity that can be tied to a Token.
This lets an operator potentially curate a set of smaller reusable
Policies and compose them together into reusable Roles, rather than
always exploding that same list of Policies on any Token that needs
similar permissions.
This also refactors the acl replication code to be semi-generic to avoid
3x copypasta.
This is mainly to avoid having the API return "0001-01-01T00:00:00Z" as
a value for the ExpirationTime field when it is not set. Unfortunately
time.Time doesn't respect the json marshalling "omitempty" directive.
These act like a special cased version of a Policy Template for granting
a token the privileges necessary to register a service and its connect
proxy, and read upstreams from the catalog.
* Update the ACL API docs
* Add a CreateTime to the anon token
Also require acl:read permissions at least to perform rule translation. Don’t want someone DoSing the system with an open endpoint that actually does a bit of work.
* Fix one place where I was referring to id instead of AccessorID
* Add godocs for the API package additions.
* Minor updates: removed some extra commas and updated the acl intro paragraph
* minor tweaks
* Updated the language to be clearer
* Updated the language to be clearer for policy page
* I was also confused by that! Your updates are much clearer.
Co-Authored-By: kaitlincarter-hc <43049322+kaitlincarter-hc@users.noreply.github.com>
* Sounds much better.
Co-Authored-By: kaitlincarter-hc <43049322+kaitlincarter-hc@users.noreply.github.com>
* Updated sidebar layout and deprecated warning
* A few API mods and unit tests.
* Update the unit tests to verify query/write metadata and to fix the rules endpoint tests.
* Make sure the full information for the replication status is in the api packge
* Implement CLI token cloning & special ID handling
* Update a couple CLI commands to take some alternative options.
* Document the CLI.
* Update the policy list and set-agent-token synopsis
This PR is almost a complete rewrite of the ACL system within Consul. It brings the features more in line with other HashiCorp products. Obviously there is quite a bit left to do here but most of it is related docs, testing and finishing the last few commands in the CLI. I will update the PR description and check off the todos as I finish them over the next few days/week.
Description
At a high level this PR is mainly to split ACL tokens from Policies and to split the concepts of Authorization from Identities. A lot of this PR is mostly just to support CRUD operations on ACLTokens and ACLPolicies. These in and of themselves are not particularly interesting. The bigger conceptual changes are in how tokens get resolved, how backwards compatibility is handled and the separation of policy from identity which could lead the way to allowing for alternative identity providers.
On the surface and with a new cluster the ACL system will look very similar to that of Nomads. Both have tokens and policies. Both have local tokens. The ACL management APIs for both are very similar. I even ripped off Nomad's ACL bootstrap resetting procedure. There are a few key differences though.
Nomad requires token and policy replication where Consul only requires policy replication with token replication being opt-in. In Consul local tokens only work with token replication being enabled though.
All policies in Nomad are globally applicable. In Consul all policies are stored and replicated globally but can be scoped to a subset of the datacenters. This allows for more granular access management.
Unlike Nomad, Consul has legacy baggage in the form of the original ACL system. The ramifications of this are:
A server running the new system must still support other clients using the legacy system.
A client running the new system must be able to use the legacy RPCs when the servers in its datacenter are running the legacy system.
The primary ACL DC's servers running in legacy mode needs to be a gate that keeps everything else in the entire multi-DC cluster running in legacy mode.
So not only does this PR implement the new ACL system but has a legacy mode built in for when the cluster isn't ready for new ACLs. Also detecting that new ACLs can be used is automatic and requires no configuration on the part of administrators. This process is detailed more in the "Transitioning from Legacy to New ACL Mode" section below.
