README.md

Amazon Verified Permissions Provider

The Amazon Verified Permissions Provider (AVP) is a fine-grained permissions management system for customer written applications. AVP uses an open source policy language known as Cedar.

The Hexa AVP Provider enables the ability to syntactically transform between policy language formats between IDQL and Cedar. This includes support for Cedar Conditions.

Feature	Description	Platform Support	Provider Support
RBAC	Support for basic translation of role-based access policy	Yes	Yes
ABAC	Support for attribute conditions	Yes	Yes
Type	Policy is described 'syntactically' in an exportable format or implied through 'role' based relationships	Syntactic	Syntactic Mapper
Attribute Mapping	Attribute names in policy can be mapped to platform		Yes
Hexa CLI	Supported in the Hexa CLI application		Yes
Discovery	Supports discovery of Policy Application Points	AVP Instance Discovery	Yes
Get Policies	Supports retrieval of all policies from a PAP	Yes	Yes
Set Policies	Supports the ability to apply a set of policies to a PAP	Yes Individual policy CRUD Restricted updates	Supported via reconciliation into CRUD
Reconcile	Returns the differences between an existing set of policies (e.g. at the source) and another set (updates)		Yes

Policy Support Notes

Support includes support for both conversion of IDQL to and from Cedar format. This GoLang implementation includes an AST parser for both Cedar Policy and the condition expressions (similar to Google Conditional Expression Language).

The following is an example Cedar policy:

permit (
    principal == User::"alice",
    action == Action::"view",
    resource == Photo::"VacationPhoto94.jpg"
);
permit (
    principal == User::"stacey",
    action == Action::"view",
    resource
)
when { resource in Account::"stacey" };

In the above example, there are 2 polcies separated by a semicolon (;). In the second policy a condition is expressed as resource in Account::"stacey". The Hexa AVP Provider interprets this policy and transforms into IDQL Json format as shown below:

{
  "policies": [
    {
      "Meta": {
        "Version": "0.6"
      },
      "Actions": [
        {
          "ActionUri": "cedar:Action::\"view\""
        }
      ],
      "Subject": {
        "Members": [
          "User:\"alice\""
        ]
      },
      "Object": {
        "resource_id": "cedar:Photo::\"VacationPhoto94.jpg\""
      }
    },
    {
      "Meta": {
        "Version": "0.6"
      },
      "Actions": [
        {
          "ActionUri": "cedar:Action::\"view\""
        }
      ],
      "Subject": {
        "Members": [
          "User:\"stacey\""
        ]
      },
      "Object": {
        "resource_id": ""
      },
      "Condition": {
        "Rule": "resource in \"Account:stacey\"",
        "Action": "permit"
      }
    }
  ]
}

Mapping support works by:

• Converting actions and resources into uris where the first element indicates the originating format (e.g. cedar:);
• Preserves quotations in original form using escaping (\");
• The Google CEL AST parser is used to parse Cedar condition expressions (they are the same form)
• Attribute mapping is configurable in the SDK using the sdk.WithAttributeMap option.

Limitations:

• Currently Hexa does not support interrogation of platform specific policy schema. This is because in part very few platforms support this feature. It should be noted that AVP does support this via the AVP API. What the mapper does instead is to syntactically convert names (e.g. to be JSON format) while leaving the names unchanged.
• Not all condition "functions" can be represented in IDQL's SCIM format. This will be extended in the future.