Contents of Rights Profiles

This section describes some typical rights profiles. Rights profiles can include authorizations, commands with security attributes, and supplementary rights profiles. The rights profiles are listed from most to least powerful. For suggestions on how to distribute rights profiles to roles at your site, see How to Plan Your RBAC Implementation.

• Primary Administrator rights profile – Provides the capabilities of superuser in one profile.

• System Administrator rights profile – Provides a profile that can do most tasks that are not connected with security. This profile includes several other profiles to create a powerful role.

• Operator rights profile – Provides limited capabilities to manage files and offline media. This profile includes supplementary rights profiles to create a simple role.

• Printer Management rights profile – Provides a limited number of commands and authorizations to handle printing. This profile is one of several profiles that cover a single area of administration.

• Basic Solaris User rights profile – Enables users to use the system within the bounds of security policy. This profile is listed by default in the policy.conf file.

• All rights profile – For roles, provides access to commands that do not have security attributes.

Each rights profile has an associated help file. The help files are in HTML and are customizable. The files reside in the /usr/lib/help/profiles/locale/C directory.

Primary Administrator Rights Profile

The Primary Administrator rights profile is assigned to the most powerful role on the system. The role that includes the Primary Administrator rights profile has superuser capabilities.

• The solaris.* authorization effectively assigns all of the authorizations that are provided by the Solaris software.

• The solaris.grant authorization lets a role assign any authorization to any rights profile, role, or user.

• The command assignment *:uid=0;gid=0 provides the ability to run any command with UID=0 and GID=0.

You can customize the help file RtPriAdmin.html for your site, if necessary. Help files are stored in the /usr/lib/help/profiles/locale/C directory.

Note also that if the Primary Administrator rights profile is not consistent with a site's security policy, the profile can be modified or not assigned at all. However, the security capabilities in the Primary Administrator rights profile would need to be handled in one or more other rights profiles. Those other rights profiles would then be assigned to roles.

Table 10-1 Contents of Primary Administrator Rights Profile

System Administrator Rights Profile

The System Administrator rights profile is intended for the System Administrator role. Because the System Administrator does not have the broad capabilities of the Primary Administrator, no wildcards are used. Instead, this profile is a set of discrete, supplementary administrative rights profiles that do not deal with security. The commands with security attributes from one of the supplementary rights profiles are shown.

Note that the All rights profile is assigned at the end of the list of supplementary rights profiles.

Table 10-2 Contents of System Administrator Rights Profile

Operator Rights Profile

The Operator rights profile is a less powerful profile that provides the ability to do backups and printer maintenance. The ability to restore files has more security consequences. Therefore, in this profile, the default is to not include the ability to restore files.

Table 10-3 Contents of Operator Rights Profile

Printer Management Rights Profile

Printer Management is a typical rights profile that is intended for a specific task area. This profile includes authorizations and commands. The following table shows a partial list of commands.

Table 10-4 Contents of Printer Management Rights Profile

Basic Solaris User Rights Profile

By default, the Basic Solaris User rights profile is assigned automatically to all users through the policy.conf file. This profile provides basic authorizations that are useful in normal operations. Note that the convenience that is offered by the Basic Solaris User rights profile must be balanced against site security requirements. Sites that need stricter security might prefer to remove this profile from the policy.conf file.

Table 10-5 Contents of Basic Solaris User Rights Profile

All Rights Profile

The All rights profile uses the wildcard to include all commands. This profile provides a role with access to all commands that are not explicitly assigned in other rights profiles. Without the All rights profile or other rights profiles that use wildcards, a role has access to explicitly assigned commands only. Such a limited a set of commands is not very practical. No authorizations are included in this profile.

If used, the All rights profile, ishould be the final rights profile that is assigned. This last position ensures that explicit security attribute assignments in other rights profiles are applied.

Table 10-6 Contents of All Rights Profile

Order of Rights Profiles

The commands in rights profiles are interpreted in order. The first occurrence of a command is the only version of the command that is used for that role or user. Different rights profiles can include the same command. Therefore, the order of rights profiles in a list of profiles is important. The rights profile with the most capabilities should be listed first.

Rights profiles are listed in the Solaris Management Console GUI and in the prof_attr file. In the Solaris Management Console GUI, the rights profile with the most capabilities should be the top profile in a list of assigned rights profiles. In the prof_attr file, the rights profile with the most capabilities should be the first in a list of supplementary profiles. This placement ensures that a command with security attributes is listed before that same command without security attributes.

Viewing the Contents of Rights Profiles

The Solaris Management Console Rights tool provides one way of inspecting the contents of the rights profiles.

The prof_attr and exec_attr files offer a more fragmented view. The prof_attr file contains the name of every rights profile that is defined on the system. The file also includes the authorizations, the privileges, and the supplementary rights profiles for each profile. The exec_attr file contains the names of rights profiles and their commands with security attributes.