[Zope3-dev] Re: Security Model

[Shane Hathaway]

On Fri, 5 Dec 2003, Evan Simpson wrote:

> [Excellent, clear explanation snipped]

Thanks.

> > I see two strategies for inventing a user interface based on these
> > concepts.  We could call everything managed by site managers "roles".
> > I presume this is basically the route Oracle takes.  What would be
> > much cooler would be to let site managers define their own security
> > nomenclature.  When you add a security moniker like 'Editor', you
> > would also select what kind of moniker it is
> 
> That's not just cooler, it's critical to making this scheme usable. 
> Roles, workgroups, permissions, privileges, and so forth can be 
> abstractly treated as simple classification labels.  These labels can be 

Ah, label.  That's the word I was looking for in place of "moniker". :-)

> applied to other labels and directly to users.  As you point out, all 
> questions about group membership and security boil down to asking 
> whether there is a chain linking a user to a group label or a security 
> permission label.  It doesn't take very many labels before the 
> collection becomes unmanageable, though -- just look at the Security tab 
> of a typical Zope Folder.

Right.  That's why I'd like to give site managers the ability to manage
the label types.  Zope 3 might ship with only two kinds of labels: 'group'
and 'role'.  I can imagine an extra-simplified Zope 3 that provides only
one label type, 'group'.  Sites add their own label types only as needed.

I'd also like a user interface that lets you manage security as a list of
rules.  I have a hypothesis that if your site's security policy is so
complicated that you need to manage it using a grid rather than a set of
rules, perhaps you need to simplify your policy.

Shane