Roles

Roles are a method of organizing a collection of users for the purposes of enabling group based permissions within the system. Within the larger security system, user id’s and roles are used to identify permissions via Access Control Lists. The Access Control List is a construct for defining the permissable operations for a given user and/or role on a given system resource.

Users can be a member and/or owner of any number of roles with no restrictions on membership. Once added to a role, the system will add the user’s id to the appropriate property of the Role document as well as the User document’s roles property. This allows easy retrievable of any user’s roles without requiring additional searches.

Members

Users can be assigned as members to a given Role object. A member inherits all permissions of the role to perform actions permissible to that group within the system. Members however only have permission to view Role data and have no permission to modify or delete the role itself.

Owners

A Role owners is a user with full privileges to add, modify and delete a Role, including any and all members, metadata and additional owners. While it is possible to define a user as only an owner of a Role, it is functionally equivalent to being both a member and an owner as the system does not make any distinction between the two. An owner is always a member of the role regardless of whether they are explicitly listed as a member or not.

Trusted Roles

On startup the system will automatically create a set of roles which are considered to be for those users with superuser permissions. These roles are called Trusted Roles and are explicitly declared in the cluster’s configuration setting upon deployment.