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Guests

Requests without a valid Authorization Bearer token will be referred to as "guests requests". Requests with a valid token will have an identified user in the context.

Authorization

Daptin has a built-in authorization framework based on users groups and permissions. Users are identified by their authorization token or other means of identification. Each request is identified as coming from a registered user or a guest.

Permission model

Every read/write to the system passes through two level of permission check.

  • Type level: apply permission on all types of entities at the same time
  • Data level: object level permission

The world table contains two columns:

  • Permission: defines the entity level permission
  • Default permission: defines the default permission for a new object of this entity type

The default permission for an object is picked from the default permission setting, and can be changed after the object creation (if the permission allows).

Permission Bits

None: 0,
GuestPeek: 1 << 0,
GuestRead: 1 << 1,
GuestCreate: 1 << 2,
GuestUpdate: 1 << 3,
GuestDelete: 1 << 4,
GuestExecute: 1 << 5,
GuestRefer: 1 << 6,
UserPeek: 1 << 7,
UserRead: 1 << 8,
UserCreate: 1 << 9,
UserUpdate: 1 << 10,
UserDelete: 1 << 11,
UserExecute: 1 << 12,
UserRefer: 1 << 13,
GroupPeek: 1 << 14,
GroupRead: 1 << 15,
GroupCreate: 1 << 16,
GroupUpdate: 1 << 17,
GroupDelete: 1 << 18,
GroupExecute: 1 << 19,
GroupRefer: 1 << 20,

OR the desired permission bits to get the final permission column value. Example

DEFAULT_PERMISSION = GuestPeek | GuestExecute | UserCRUD | UserExecute | GroupCRUD | GroupExecute

Authorization

Authorization is the part where daptin decides if the caller has enough permission to execute the call. Access check happens at two levels:

  • Entity level check
  • Object level check

Both the checks have a "before" and "after" part.

Object level permission check

Once the call clears the entity level check, an object level permission check is applied. This happens in cases where the action is going to affect/read an existing row. The permission is stored in the same way. Each table has a permission column which stores the permission in OOOGGGXXX format.

Order of permission check

The permission is checked in order of:

  • Check if the user is owner, if yes, check if permission allows the current action, if yes do action
  • Check if the user belongs to a group to which this object also belongs, if yes, check if permisison allows the current action, if yes do action
  • User is guest, check if guest permission allows this actions, if yes do action, if no, unauthorized

Things to note here:

  • There is no negative permission (this may be introduced in the future)
  • eg, you cannot say owner is 'not allowed' to read but read by guest is allowed.
  • Permission check is done in a hierarchy type order

Access flow

Every "interaction" in daptin goes through two levels of access. Each level has a before and after check.

  • Entity level access: does the user invoking the interaction has the appropriate permission to invoke this (So for sign up, the user table need to be writable by guests, for sign in the user table needs to be peakable by guests)
  • Instance level access: this is the second level, even if a User Account has access to "user" entity, not all "user" rows would be accessible by them

So the actual checks happen in following order:

  • "Before check" for entity
  • "Before check" for instance
  • "After check" for instance
  • "After check" for entity

Each of these checks can filter out objects where the user does not have enough permission.

Entity level permission

Entity level permission are set in the world table and can be updated from dashboard. This can be done by updating the "permission" column for the entity.

For these changes to take effect a restart is necessary.

Instance level permission

Like we saw in the entity documentation, every table has a permission column. No restart is necessary for changes in these permission.

You can choose to disable new user registration by changing the signup action permissions.

User data API Examples

Users are just like any other data you maintain. User information is stored in the user_account table and exposed over /api/user_account endpoint.

You can choose to allow read/write permission directly to that table to allow other users/processes to use this api to read/create/update/delete users.

User groups

User groups is a group concept that helps you manage "who" can interact with daptin, and in what ways.

All objects (including users and groups) belong to one or more user group.

Users can interact with objects which also belong to their group based on the defined group permission setting

Social login

Oauth connection can be used to allow guests to identify themselves based on the email provided by the oauth id provider.

Social login

Allow users to login using their existing social accounts like twitter/google/github.

Daptin can work with any oauth flow aware identity provider to allow new users to be registered (if you have disabled normal signup).

Create a OAuth Connection and mark "Allow login" to enable APIs for OAuth flow.

Examples

Google login configuration

Google oauth

Dropbox login configuration

Google oauth

Github login configuration

Google oauth

Linkedin login configuration

Google oauth

Encrypted values

The secrets are stored after encryption so the value you see in above screenshots are encrypted values.

Configuring default user group

You can configure which User groups should newly registered users be added to after their signup.

This can be configured in the table properties from the dashboard or by updating the entity configuration from the API

Resync required

Resync action is required to be called for default group settings to take effect

Authentication token

The authentication token is a JWT token issued by daptin on sign in action. Users can create new actions to allow other means of generating JWT token. It is as simple as adding another outcome to an action.

Server side

Daptin uses OAuth 2 based authentication strategy. HTTP calls are checked for Authorization header, and if present, validated as a JWT token. The JWT token should have been issued by daptin earlier and should not have expired. To see how to generate JWT token, checkout the sing-in action.

The JWT token contains the issuer information (daptin) plus basic user profile (email). The JWT token has a one hour (configurable) expiry from the time of issue.

If the token is absent or invalid, the user is considered as a guest. Guests also have certain permissions. Checkout the Authorization docs for details.

Client side

On the client side, for dashboard, the token is stored in local storage. The local storage is cleared on logout or if the server responds with a 401 Unauthorized status.