How to Plan Your RBAC Implementation

RBAC can be an integral part of how an organization manages its information resources. Planning requires a thorough knowledge of the RBAC capabilities as well as the security requirements of your organization.

1. Learn the basic RBAC concepts.

   Read Role-Based Access Control (Overview). Using RBAC to administer a system is very different from using conventional UNIX administrative practices. You should be familiar with the RBAC concepts before you start your implementation. For greater detail, see Chapter 10, Role-Based Access Control (Reference).

2. Examine your security policy.

   Your organization's security policy should detail the potential threats to your system, measure the risk of each threat, and have a strategy to counter these threats. Isolating the security-relevant tasks through RBAC can be a part of the strategy. Although you can install the recommended roles and their configurations as is, you might need to customize your RBAC configuration to adhere to your security policy.

3. Decide how much RBAC your organization needs.

   Depending on your security needs, you can use varying degrees of RBAC, as follows:

   • No RBAC – You can perform all tasks as root user. In this configuration, you log in as yourself. Then, you type root as the user when you select a Solaris Management Console tool.

   • Single Role Only – This method adds one role. The one role is assigned the Primary Administrator rights profile. This method is similar to the superuser model, in that the role has superuser capabilities. However, this method enables you to track the user who has assumed the role.

   • Recommended Roles – This method creates three roles that are based on the following rights profiles: Primary Administrator, System Administrator, and Operator. The roles are suitable for organizations with administrators at different levels of responsibility.

   • Custom Roles – You can create your own roles to meet the security requirements of your organization. The new roles can be based on existing or customized rights profiles. To customize rights profiles that enforce separation of duty, see Creating Roles and Users in Trusted Extensions in Oracle Solaris Trusted Extensions Configuration Guide..

   • Root User as a Role – This method prevents any user from logging in as root. Instead, users must log in as ordinary users prior to assuming the root role. For details, see How to Make root User Into a Role.

4. Decide which recommended roles are appropriate for your organization.

   Review the capabilities of the recommended roles and default rights profiles. Default rights profiles enable administrators to configure a recommended role by using a single profile.

   Three default rights profiles are available for configuring the recommended roles:

   • Primary Administrator rights profile – For configuring a role that can perform all administrative tasks, can grant rights to others, and can edit rights that are associated with administrative roles. A user in this role can assign this role to other users, and can grant rights to other users.

   • System Administrator rights profile – For configuring a role that can perform most administrative tasks that are not related to security. For example, the System Administrator can add new user accounts, but cannot set passwords or grant rights to other users.

   • Operator rights profile – For configuring a role that can perform simple administrative tasks, such as media backup and printer maintenance.

   To further examine rights profiles, read one of the following:

   • In the /etc/security directory, read the contents of the prof_attr database and the exec_attr database.

   • In the Solaris Management Console, use the Rights tool to display the contents of a rights profile.

   • In this book, refer to Contents of Rights Profiles for summaries of some typical rights profiles.

5. Decide if any additional roles or rights profiles are appropriate for your organization.

   Look for other applications or families of applications at your site that might benefit from restricted access. Applications that affect security, that can cause denial-of-service problems, or that require special administrator training are good candidates for RBAC. You can customize roles and rights profiles to handle the security requirements of your organization.

   1. Determine which commands are needed for the new task.

   2. Decide which rights profile is appropriate for this task.

      Check if an existing rights profile can handle this task or if a separate rights profile needs to be created.

   3. Determine which role is appropriate for this rights profile.

      Decide if the rights profile for this task should be assigned to an existing role or if a new role should be created. If you use an existing role, check that the other rights profiles are appropriate for users who are assigned to this role.

6. Decide which users should be assigned to the available roles.

   According to the principle of least privilege, you should assign users to roles that are appropriate to their level of trust. When you prevent users from access to tasks that the users do not need to perform, you reduce potential problems.