loopback-object-acl

Loopback provides great "class-level" ACL's for restricting access to a whole Model or its mehods, but greatly lacks the ability to restric access to individual objects. This project tries to solve this, by setting object-level ACL's on each object, and manipulates Loopback's Query to only return objects the requesting user has access to.

Tests

CircleCI:

Examples

User Read-level permissions

Lets say we want a Book-object only to be readable (pun intended) by 3 users (id: "aaa", id: "bbb" and id: "ccc"):

POST /api/books

{
   "title": "Clean Code",
   "subtitle": "A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship",
   "_acl":{
     "r_perm": {
       "users":["aaa", "bbb", "ccc"]
     }
   }
}

The mixin will parse the object to be stored as in Mongo:

{
   id: ObjectId("123"),
   title: "Clean Code",
   subtitle: "A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship",
   r: {
     u: ["aaa", "bbb", "ccc"]
     g: []
   },
   w: {
     u: [],
     g: []
   }
}

This object can now only be accessed by a user with an id of "aaa", "bbb" or "ccc" and no one else. When retrieving, the mixin will parse the object's ACL right back again:

GET /api/books/123
authorization: accessToken-aaa

returns:

{
   "id": "123"
   "title": "Clean Code",
   "subtitle": "A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship",
   "_acl":{
     "r_perm": {
       "users":["aaa", "bbb", "ccc"]
     }
   }
}

Whereas requesting without permissions leads to:

GET /api/books/123
authorization: accessToken-ddd

returns:

404 Not found

Group Read-level permissions

To specifiy every user that will have access to the object can be cumbersome and timeconsuming. This is where groups come in handy.

POST /api/books

{
   "title": "Clean Code",
   "subtitle": "A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship",
   "_acl":{
     "r_perm": {
       "groups":["group-id-1"]
     }
   }
}

As you've might guessed, this object is now accessible by users who has group-id-1 specified in acl_groups on the User object.

Combining Group and Read-level permissions

If user-id-1 and user-id-2 is not in group-id-1 then these users can have explicit access this way:

POST /api/books

{
   "title": "Clean Code",
   "subtitle": "A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship",
   "_acl":{
     "r_perm": {
       "groups":["group-id-1"],
       "users":["user-id-1", "user-id-2"]
     }
   }
}

Public objects

If you have installed the mixin on your model but you dont specify $acl on creation of a new object, the objects visibility will be public, ex:

POST /api/books

{
   "title": "Clean Code",
   "subtitle": "A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship"
}

returns

{
   "title": "Clean Code",
   "subtitle": "A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship",
   "_acl":{
     "r_perm": {
       "groups":["*"],
       "users":["*"]
     },
     "w_perm": {
       "groups":["*"],
       "users":["*"]
     }
   }
}

Install

npm install --save loopback-object-acl

In model-config.json add ../node_modules/loopback-object-acl to mixins

  "_meta": {
    "sources": [
      "loopback/common/models",
      "loopback/server/models",
      "../common/models",
      "./models"
    ],
    "mixins": [
      "loopback/common/mixins",
      "loopback/server/mixins",
      "../common/mixins",
      "./mixins",
      "../node_modules/loopback-object-acl"
    ]
  }

Set ObjectAclController on what ever model you would like to protect with Object-level ACL:

book.json

{
  "name": "Book",
  "base": "PersistedModel",
  "idInjection": true,
  "options": {
    "validateUpsert": true
  },
  "mixins": {
    "ObjectAclController": {}
  }
  ...
}

CurrentUser in context

This mixins expects a currentUser object on the options object. This is not default Loopback v3.x behavior, and must be implemented before usage.

Implementation can found here: http://loopback.io//doc/en/lb3/Using-current-context.html#use-a-custom-strong-remoting-phase

Compatibility

This mixin is only tested with Loopback v3.X and using MongoDB as DataSource

TODO

Read-permissions

• Do only return objects from database that the requesting user has access to.

Write-permissions

Version 2.0

Client

• Set ACL on object-creation
• Set permissions on user creation

Tests

• ObjectAcl.js
• CurrentUserUtil.js