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• Authentication answers the question "who is the person, and how do I verify that they are who they say they are?"  Fedora 4 relies on the web servlet container to answer this question.
• Authorization answers the question, "does this person have permission to do what they want to do?".  Fedora 4 provides four different ways to answer this question:
  • Bypass authorization.  Anyone who has authenticated through the web application container (Tomcat, Jetty, WebSphere, etc.) has permission to do everything – in effect all, authenticated users are superusers.
  • WebAC authorizations. Authenticated users' access to resources is mediated by WebAC Authorization DelegateAccess Control Lists stored in the repository.
  • [Deprecated] Basic Access Roles authorizations (RBACL). Authenticated users are mapped onto one or more preconfigured roles;  a user's role determines what they have permission to do.
  • [Deprecated] XACML authorizations. Policies created using the XACML framework are used to determine what operations are permissible to whom, using user and resource properties exposed to the XACML engine.

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WebAC Authorization Delegate

WebAC Authorization DelegateWeb Access Control

Basic Role-based Authorization Delegate

Basic Role-based Authorization Delegate (RBACL)

Access Roles Module

XACML Authorization Delegate

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