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Fedora 4 uses relies on its servlet container authentication (Realms) to provide minimal protection for your repository, including the set up of "superuser" accounts.  authentication. User credentials are configured in your web application container, usually in a properties file or XML file. By configuring superuser accounts you can require authentication for all management (write) operations.  This document describes how to set up Fedora and either Tomcat or Jetty to enable HTTP Basic Authentication, using simple user files.   Consult your web application server documentation for other ways to configure and manage users. Fedora can handle any user principal passed to it by the servlet container, as provisioned by any of the container's supported authentication mechanisms.

Table of Contents

Container Roles

Fedora uses two container roles to determine its authorization behavior. The superuser role is fedoraAdmin. Users with this role are not subject to any further authorization checks, and thus can perform any operations on the repository. This is comparable to the fedoraAdmin superuser role in Fedora 3, used for Fedora 3 API-M operations.

Table of Contents

The Fedora authorization modules reside in separate source code modules from the core Fedora web-application.

Warning

As of Fedora 4.7.4 Release Notes, the RBACL and XACML authorization modules are officially deprecated, and will not be included in future releases of Fedora. Subsequent Fedora releases will only include the WebAC authorization module.

As a result, each release includes pre-built Fedora "webapp-plus" war files that have the authorization modules included. You are recommended to use one of these "webapp-plus" war files as a starting point for having an authorization-enabled deployment.

You can then follow the guidelines in the Best Practices - Fedora Configuration document to specify site-specific "repo.xml" and "repository.json" configurations, as further described below.The regular user role is fedoraUser. Users with this role are subject to authorization checks by the Web Access Control system. The exact permissions any regular user has are determined per request by looking at the effective ACL of the requested resource, the requesting user's security principals, and the nature of the request (HTTP method, content-type, etc.).

Configure your repo.xml file

...

See the sample Spring configuration for setting up a repo.xml to use servlet container authentication.

To specify a local repo.xml configuration, provide the system property as follows:

...

Code Block

...

JAVA_OPTS="... -Dfcrepo.spring.repo.configuration=file:/local/repo.xml"

Configure your repository.json file

Modify the security section to enable both authenticated (via authentication provider) and internal sessions between Fedora and ModeShape. 

...

To specify a local repository.json configuration, provide the system property as follows:

...

It should contain a "security" element that matches this block:

Code Block
languageruby
titlerepository.json security
"security" : {        
        "anonymous" : {
            "roles" : ["readonly","readwrite","admin"],
            "useOnFailedLogin" : false
        },
        "providers" : [
            { "classname" : "org.fcrepo.auth.common.ShiroAuthenticationProvider" }
        ]
    },


To specify a local repository.json configuration, provide the system property as follows:

Code Block
JAVA_OPTS="... -Dfcrepo.modeshape.configuration=file:/local/repository.json"


Configure your web.xml

Configure your web.xml.

...

Modify fcrepo-webapp/src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml by uncommenting the security configuration:

Code Block
  <!--Uncomment section below to enable Basic-Authentication-->
  <security-constraint>
    <web-resource-collection>
      <web-resource-name>Fedora4</web-resource-name>
      <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
      <http-method>DELETE</http-method>
      <http-method>PUT</http-method>
      <http-method>HEAD</http-method>
      <http-method>OPTIONS</http-method>
      <http-method>PATCH</http-method>
      <http-method>GET</http-method>
      <http-method>POST</http-method>
    </web-resource-collection>
    <auth-constraint>
      <role-name>fedoraUser</role-name>
      <role-name>fedoraAdmin</role-name>
    </auth-constraint>
    <user-data-constraint>
      <transport-guarantee>NONE</transport-guarantee>
    </user-data-constraint>
  </security-constraint>
  <login-config>
    <auth-method>BASIC</auth-method>
    <realm-name>fcrepo</realm-name>
  </login-config>


Note
The "auth-constraint" element must contain the roles defined as your users (see below for jetty and tomcat).

Configure your web application container

Jetty

  • Create your jetty-users.properties file.  This file contains entries in the format username:  password [, role, ...], where
    • username is the user's login id (the principal)
    • password is the user's password
    • role is the servlet role they are assigned upon login;  jetty allows you to specify any number of roles (or no role at all).
  •   Fedora currently supports two roles:  fedoraAdmin, which is the superuser role, and has rights to do everything;  and fedoraUser, which is a user role, and must be granted permissions by the Policy Enforcement Point to perform actions.
  • Sample jetty-users.properties file that contains three users, two of whom are regular users, and the third of whom (fedoraAdmin) is a Fedora superuser:
Code Block
titlejetty-users.properties
testuser: password1,fedoraUser
adminuser: password2,fedoraUser
fedoraAdmin: secret3,fedoraAdmin
  • Configure your Jetty login realm.
    • Standalone


    • : Modify your jetty.xml file to configure the login realm and include the jetty-users.properties file:

      Code Block
      languagexml
      titlejetty.xml login service
  • Embedded in Maven

    • <Configure class="org.eclipse.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">
        
        <!-- Set this to the webapp root of your Fedora 4 repository -->
        <Set name="contextPath">/</Set>
        <!-- Set this to the path of of fcrepo4 WAR file -->
        <Set name="war"><SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default="."/>/webapps/fcrepo4</Set>
       
        <Get name="securityHandler">
          <Set name="loginService">
            <New class="org.eclipse.jetty.security.HashLoginService">
              <Set name="name">fcrepo4</Set>
              <!-- Set this to the path to your jetty-users.properties file -->
              <Set name="config"><SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default="."/>/path/to/jetty-users.properties</Set>
            </New>
          </Set>
        </Get>
       
      </Configure>
      
      
      


    • Embedded in Maven: The fcrepo-webapp Maven project includes jetty-maven-plugin.

  •  
    • The property jetty.users.file sets the location of the jetty-users.properties file.

  •  
    • Run the fcrepo-webapp server with the following system property:

-Djetty.users.file=/path/to/jetty-users.properties

Tomcat

  • Create or edit your $CATALINA_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml file.  It has entries of the form
     <user name="principal" password="password" roles="role1, role2, ..." />

    where:

    • name is the user's login id (the principal)
    • password is the user's password
    • roles are the servlet roles they are assigned upon login;  tomcat allows you to specify any number of roles (or no role at all)
  • .  Fedora currently supports two roles:  fedoraAdmin, which is the superuser role, and has rights to do everything;  and fedoraUser, which is a user role, and must be granted permissions by the Policy Enforcement Point to perform actions
    • .

    Sample tomcat-users.xml file that contains three users, two of whom are regular users, and the third of whom (fedoraAdmin) is a Fedora superuser:

    Code Block
    languagexml
    titletomcat-users.xml
    <tomcat-users>
      <role rolename="fedoraUser" />
      <role rolename="fedoraAdmin" />
      <user name="testuser" password="password1" roles="fedoraUser" />
      <user name="adminuser" password="password2" roles="fedoraUser" />
      <user name="fedoraAdmin" password="secret3" roles="fedoraAdmin" />
    </tomcat-users>


  • Configure your Tomcat login realm.


  • Modify your file $CATALINA_HOME/conf/server.xml file to configure the login realm with the Fedora

  • 4
  • webapp context:

    Code Block
    languagexml
    title
  • Tomcat
  • server.xml
  • Realm
  • <Context>
      ...
      <Realm className="org.apache.catalina.realm.UserDatabaseRealm" resourceName="UserDatabase" />
      ...
    </Context>