Access control lists for saved objects

Introduced 2.18

You can use access control lists (ACLs) to manage permissions for your saved objects, providing authorization (AuthZ) capabilities without requiring backend plugin integration.

Understanding ACL types

ACLs are applied at two levels:

1. Workspace ACL: Workspace objects inherit permissions from their parent workspace. See Workspace ACL for more information.
2. Objects ACL: Each individual object can have its own ACL policy. All operations on these objects must pass ACL policy validation.

Enabling the ACL feature

The ACL feature must be enabled before you can define any access controls. Enable it by:

1. Opening your opensearch_dashboards.yml file.
2. Enabling permissions with savedObjects.permission.enabled: true.

Defining ACL permissions

ACL permissions are defined using the following schema:

{
  "permissions": {
    "<permission_type_1>": {
        "users": ["<principal_1>", "<principal_2>"],
        "groups": ["<principal_3>", "<principal_4>"]
    }
  } 
}

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Granting permissions to authenticated users

The wildcard character (*) grants permissions to all authenticated users. In the following example, the ACL grants workspace management permissions to the finance_manager group and dashboard creation permissions to the finance_analyst group:

{
  "permissions": {
    "write": {
        "groups": ["finance_manager"]
    },
    "library_write": {
        "groups": ["finance_analyst"]
    }
  } 
}

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Configuring mixed-level permissions

To allow one user, user-1 for example, to modify an object while giving read-only access to others, you can configure the ACL policy as follows:

{
  "permissions": {
    "read": {
        "users": ["*"]
    },
    "write": {
        "users": ["user-1"]
    },
  }
}

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