   ____  __   __  _   _      _       ____    ___    ____       _    
  / ___| \ \ / / | \ | |    / \     / ___|  / _ \  |  _ \     / \   
 | |      \ V /  |  \| |   / _ \   | |  _  | | | | | |_) |   / _ \  
 | |___    | |   | |\  |  / ___ \  | |_| | | |_| | |  _ <   / ___ \ 
  \____|   |_|   |_| \_| /_/   \_\  \____|  \___/  |_| \_\ /_/   \_\

Cynagora

Cynagora is fast, simple and safe permission database service. Functions of cynagora are:

checking access for certain permission
holding permission database
simple, single function API - for checking permissions
ability to use external agent (in case of policies that can't be full processed in cynagora and plugins)

Basics

Cynagora delivers permissions based on 4 keys: CLIENT, SESSION, USER, PERMISSION.

The original principle is that a server ask cynagora if a permission (the key PERMISSION) is granted for a client identified by:

its Smack label (the key CLIENT)
its user identifier, uid (the key USER)
its process identifier, pid (the key SESSION)

In facts, the keys can be used with other values that the one primarily designed. For example, using the pid for the session is not safe. So it can be replaced with a string really identifying a session.

The database of cynagora is made of rules. Each cynagora rule is a tuple of five strings and one integer:

(CLIENT, SESSION, USER, PERMISSION, RESULT, EXPIRE).

The strings CLIENT, SESSION, USER, PERMISSION are arbitrary. They can also have the special value * (STAR) that means that the rule matches any value. Otherwise, the rule matches a query only if the value matches the string of the rule. That match is:

case sensitive for CLIENT, SESSION, USER
case insensitive for PERMISSION

The string RESULT has basically one of the two values yes or no. It can also be an agent item that will imply a request to an existing agent (see file agent.md for details on agents).

When more than one rule match the query, only one is selected to apply using the following rules:

the rules that matched with the less STAR as possible are selected (it means that selected rules must matche more precisely the request)
then from the rules selected above the rule that matches more exactly the keys in the following order of priority: session, user, client, permission

Cynagora implements handles differently the rules targeting any sessions and the rules targeting specific sessions. The rules that have SESSION equals to * are stored persistentely in the filesystem. That rule whose SESSION is not STAR are volatile and only reside in memory.

Expiration is a 64 bits signed integer that express the date of expiration of the rule in epoch (number of seconds since 1 January 1970). The special value 0 means no expiration, permanent rule. The negative values are used to avoid caching, their expiration value is given by the formula -(1 + x).

Cynagora allows tiers programs to add features through the agent mechanism. The file agent.md explains it more in detail.

API Overview

CYNAGORA comes with 2 APIs:

a protocol API that can be easily implemented in most languages (see protocol.md)
a client C library (see src/cynagora.h)

It also provide optionally for compatibility a subset of the C client libraries.

History

Cynagora is a refit of cynara that allows inclusion of expirations. It implements the same permission database by principle but the details changes.

[WARNING compatibility with cynara will be removed soon] As a possible replacement, cynagora can supply a simple compatibility library that offers light legacy API of cynara. This would allow to run simple cynara clients (admin/check/async-check but not agents) without changes.

Compiling

Cynagora is written in language C.

Cynagora only depends of libcap that is used by the cynagora server.

The server can be built for using systemd socket activation. In that case it requires lisystemd.

Compiling with cmake and make

The compilation use the build system cmake.

Example for compiling and installing cynagora:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make install

Options to pass to cmake:

WITH_SYSTEMD: flag for generating systemd compatible units (default ON)
DEFAULT_DB_DIR: path of the directory for the database (default ${CMAKE_INSTALL_FULL_LOCALSTATEDIR}/lib/cynagora)
DEFAULT_SOCKET_DIR: directory path of the sockets (default ${CMAKE_INSTALL_FULL_RUNSTATEDIR}/cynagora)
DEFAULT_INIT_FILE: path to the initialization file to use (default ${CMAKE_INSTALL_FULL_SYSCONFDIR}/security/cynagora.initial)
WITH_CYNARA_COMPAT: flag for producing cynara compatibility artifacts (default OFF) [WARNING will be removed soon]
DIRECT_CYNARA_COMPAT: if true, dont use the shared client library to access cynara server but use the static library instead, avoid a dependency to the shared library.

Example:

cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/.local -DWITH_SYSTEMD=OFF ..
make install

Licenses

Cynagora is licensed under a Apache License Version 2.0, January 2004, available on Apache website or in Apache-2.0 file.

Logo is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0), avaliable on creative commons website or in CC-BY-SA-3.0 file.

H-H-bin/sec-cynagora