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Authorization
TOC(inline, GenericAuthorization)
Proposal
As part of Google's 2006 Summer of Code, Joseph Kocherhans will be implementing a more flexible authorization system for Django. The new system should allow for ACL's, role-based systems, and Django's current model-level permissions. peak.security http://peak.telecommunity.com/DevCenter/SecurityRules will be used as a basic model, but things will be made more django-like where it makes sense.
Currently Django's authentication system is tied directly to the User model from django.contrib.auth. Also, there is no way to allow for row-level permissions. Authentication checks will be changed to use a new generic function:
has_permission(user, permission, object)
This function will delegate to other functions based on the type of user, permission and object that are passed to it. This will allow the use of different types of security rules depending on the type of object being accessed, as well as allowing for new user objects that don't need to fulfill the whole django.contrib.auth.models.User interface. You can even create rules that don't depend on the default permission table in the database.
Scope
The scope of this project is limited to providing the underlying support for making ACL's, etc possible, not actually implementing such policies. A policy that mimicks Django's model-level permission system will be included though.
Usage
Checking a permission
from django.contrib.auth import has_permission if has_permission(user, permission, object): # do something
Adding new rules
Here's an example of the low level api for adding new security rules. In reality, this will probably happen under the covers via new Meta settings, but this will be discussed later, probably after the low level stuff has been implemented and tested.
from django.contrib.auth.models import User from django.contrib.auth import has_permission def default_has_permission(user, permission, object=None): return user.has_perm(permission) has_permission.register(default_has_permission, User)
This is fairly close to what it would look like to implement django's current security policy. The object isn't really important in this case since Django's permissions are based on the Model you're accessing, not the actual object (See RowLevelPermissions for object-specific permissions.) We is we pass more than just User to the register method, we can register different security rules for different Models.
Implementation
has_permission will be implemented as a class with a register method and a __call__(self, user, permission, object) method.
This method is similar to Philip J. Eby's [RuleDispatch http://peak.telecommunity.com/PyCon05Talk/] and Guido van Rossum's recent work on generic/overloaded functions. See references for examples. The plan is to start out with a really naive and simple implementation, if it works and performs reasonably it should probably be left simple.
Roadmap
Here's a simple roadmap for this project. I'll try to keep it as up to date as possible, noting changeset numbers as tasks are completed.
| Task | Status |
| Implement and test the has_permission generic function. | Not Started |
| Implement a function to mimic Django's current authorization. | Not Started |
Update the admin system to use has_permission and test. | Not Started |
Update other views/decorators to use has_permission and test. | Not Started |
| Revise this page and integrate into core django docs. (Is this allowed for SoC, I'l let my mentor decide, if not, I'll just do it after SoC is over) | Not Started |