Restricting Access to the Get Effective Rights Control

The operation of viewing effective rights is a directory operation that needs to be protected and appropriately restricted.

To restrict access to effective rights information, modify the default ACI for getEffectiveRights attribute. Then create a new ACI for the getEffectiveRightsInfo attribute .

For example, the following ACI allows only members of the Directory Administrators Group to get effective rights:

aci: (targetattr != "aci")(version 3.0; acl
 "getEffectiveRights"; allow(all) groupdn =
 "ldap:///cn=Directory Administrators,ou=Groups,dc=example,dc=com";)

To obtain effective rights information, you need to have access control rights to use the Effective Rights control and read access to the aclRights attribute. This double layer of access control provides basic security that can be more finely tuned if necessary. By analogy with proxy, if you have read access to the aclRights attribute in an entry, you can request information about anyone’s rights to that entry and its attributes. This implies that the user who manages the resource can determine who has rights to that resource, even if that user does not actually manage those with the rights.

If a user requesting rights information does not have the rights to use the Effective Rights control, the operation fails and an error message is returned. However, if the user requesting rights information does have the rights to use the control but lacks the rights to read the aclRights attribute, the aclRights attribute will not appear in the returned entry. This behavior reflects Directory Server’s general search behavior.