path: root/README.rst

========
Keystone
========

Keystone is an OpenStack project that provides Identity, Token, Catalog and
Policy services for use specifically by projects in the OpenStack family.

Much of the design is precipitated from the expectation that the auth backends
for most deployments will actually be shims in front of existing user systems.


-----------
Development
-----------


Setting up a development environment
------------------------------------

Please see the documentation under ``doc/source/`` for development setup
(``doc/source/setup.rst``) and configuration
(``doc/source/configuration.rst``).


Building the Documentation
--------------------------

The documentation is all generated with Sphinx from within the doc directory.
To generate the full set of HTML documentation::

  tox -evenv python setup.py build_sphinx

the results are in the ``doc/build/html`` and ``doc/build/man`` directories
respectively.


------------
The Services
------------

Keystone is organized as a group of services exposed on one or many endpoints.
Many of these services are used in a combined fashion by the frontend, for
example an authenticate call will validate user/tenant credentials with the
Identity service and, upon success, create and return a token with the Token
service.


Identity
--------

The Identity service provides auth credential validation and data about Users,
Tenants and Roles, as well as any associated metadata.

In the basic case all this data is managed by the service, allowing the service
to manage all the CRUD associated with the data.

In other cases, this data is pulled, by varying degrees, from an authoritative
backend service. An example of this would be when backending on LDAP. See
`LDAP Backend` below for more details.


Token
-----

The Token service validates and manages Tokens used for authenticating requests
once a user/tenant's credentials have already been verified.


Catalog
-------

The Catalog service provides an endpoint registry used for endpoint discovery.


Policy
------

The Policy service provides a rule-based authorization engine and the
associated rule management interface.


----------
Data Model
----------

Keystone was designed from the ground up to be amenable to multiple styles of
backends and as such many of the methods and data types will happily accept
more data than they know what to do with and pass them on to a backend.

There are a few main data types:

 * **User**: has account credentials, is associated with one or more tenants
 * **Tenant**: unit of ownership in openstack, contains one or more users
 * **Role**: a first-class piece of metadata associated with many user-tenant pairs.
 * **Token**: identifying credential associated with a user or user and tenant
 * **Extras**: bucket of key-value metadata associated with a user-tenant pair.
 * **Rule**: describes a set of requirements for performing an action.

While the general data model allows a many-to-many relationship between Users
and Tenants and a many-to-one relationship between Extras and User-Tenant pairs,
the actual backend implementations take varying levels of advantage of that
functionality.


KVS Backend
-----------

A simple backend interface meant to be further backended on anything that can
support primary key lookups, the most trivial implementation being an in-memory
dict.

Supports all features of the general data model.


PAM Backend
-----------

Extra simple backend that uses the current system's PAM service to authenticate,
providing a one-to-one relationship between Users and Tenants with the `root`
User also having the 'admin' role.


Templated Backend
-----------------

Largely designed for a common use case around service catalogs in the Keystone
project, a Catalog backend that simply expands pre-configured templates to
provide catalog data.

Example paste.deploy config (uses $ instead of % to avoid ConfigParser's
interpolation)::

  [DEFAULT]
  catalog.RegionOne.identity.publicURL = http://localhost:$(public_port)s/v2.0
  catalog.RegionOne.identity.adminURL = http://localhost:$(public_port)s/v2.0
  catalog.RegionOne.identity.internalURL = http://localhost:$(public_port)s/v2.0
  catalog.RegionOne.identity.name = 'Identity Service'


----------------
Approach to CRUD
----------------

While it is expected that any "real" deployment at a large company will manage
their users, tenants and other metadata in their existing user systems, a
variety of CRUD operations are provided for the sake of development and testing.

CRUD is treated as an extension or additional feature to the core feature set in
that it is not required that a backend support it.


----------------------------------
Approach to Authorization (Policy)
----------------------------------

Various components in the system require that different actions are allowed
based on whether the user is authorized to perform that action.

For the purposes of Keystone there are only a couple levels of
authorization being checked for:

 * Require that the performing user is considered an admin.
 * Require that the performing user matches the user being referenced.

Other systems wishing to use the policy engine will require additional styles
of checks and will possibly write completely custom backends. Backends included
in Keystone are:


Rules
-----

Given a list of matches to check for, simply verify that the credentials
contain the matches. For example::

  credentials = {'user_id': 'foo', 'is_admin': 1, 'roles': ['nova:netadmin']}

  # An admin only call:
  policy_api.enforce(('is_admin:1',), credentials)

  # An admin or owner call:
  policy_api.enforce(('is_admin:1', 'user_id:foo'), credentials)

  # A netadmin call:
  policy_api.enforce(('roles:nova:netadmin',), credentials)

Credentials are generally built from the user metadata in the 'extras' part
of the Identity API. So, adding a 'role' to the user just means adding the role
to the user metadata.


Capability RBAC
---------------

(Not yet implemented.)

Another approach to authorization can be action-based, with a mapping of roles
to which capabilities are allowed for that role. For example::

  credentials = {'user_id': 'foo', 'is_admin': 1, 'roles': ['nova:netadmin']}

  # add a policy
  policy_api.add_policy('action:nova:add_network', ('roles:nova:netadmin',))

  policy_api.enforce(('action:nova:add_network',), credentials)


In the backend this would look up the policy for 'action:nova:add_network' and
then do what is effectively a 'Simple Match' style match against the creds.


----------------------------------
Dependencies
----------------------------------

Ensure an OpenSSL version of 1.0+ is installed.