Tuesday, November 22, 2016

IGI Attribute Hierarchies

IBM Security Identity Governance & Intelligence (or IGI for short) has a very neat feature whereby hierarchies can be constructed using any attribute associated with an identity. Now, instead of identities being firmly placed within a rigid organizational hierarchy, additional hierarchies can be created to help model entitlements more accurately.

For example, it could be useful for everyone who reports to a specific manager to be automatically assigned a suite of entitlements. Additionally, we could find that rights should be assigned based on regional or office location.

Fundamentally, the assignment of this rights is somewhat akin to how IBM Security Identity Manager could be configured with dynamic roles - except IGI's approach is so much more powerful.

For example, let's consider identity records that contain the following attributes:
  • Country
  • City
  • Address

It could be interesting to model that hierarchy and "virtually" place identities in a hierarchy that might look like this:

World
- United Kingdom
- - Belfast
- - - 1 Main Street
- - London
- - - 2 High Street
- - - 3 Oxford Street
- - - 4 Piccadilly
- France
- - Paris
- - - 5 Rue de Provence

etc.

Modelling the hierarchy is simple. As an IGI administrator, one merely needs to navigate to Access Governance Core > Configure > Rules. In here, we can create a Rules Sequence called  LOCATION_HIERARCHY of type Hierarchy.

Now, within the Rules tab, we can select the rule class Hierarchy and rule flow LOCATION_HIERARCHY (ignoring the fact that the naming convention mismatch between sequence and flow is rather annoying).

Within the package imports section, we would place the following:

import com.engiweb.profilemanager.common.bean.UserBean
import com.crossideas.certification.common.bean.data.ResultBean
import com.engiweb.profilemanager.common.ruleengine.action.UtilAction
import java.util.ArrayList

global com.engiweb.pm.dao.db.DAO sql
global com.engiweb.logger.impl.Log4JImpl logger

This suite of imports exposing methods which we can now use. Our next step is to CREATE a Rules Package with the following code:

when
    userBean : UserBean(  )  
    resultBean : ResultBean(  )
then
/* Country>City>Office */
    String country = userBean.getCountry();
    String city = userBean.getLocality();
    String office = userBean.getAddress();

    if (country != null && city != null && office != null) {
        resultBean.setResultString("World;" + country + ";" + city + ";" + office); 
    } else {
        resultBean.setResultString("World"); 
    }

What does this code do? Well, it iterates over every identity in the platform and constructs a string of World;Country;City;Office which can be passed back to the core platform in order to construct a hierarchy. Give the package a "sensible" name (like Country>City>Office) and assign it to the LOCATION_HIERARCHY rule flow.

The next step is to Access Governance Core > Configure > Hierarchy in order to create a hierarchy that can use our rule flow. Under the Actions link, click on Add. Populate the blank form with the following details:

Name: Location Hierarchy
Configuration Type: Advanced
Rule: LOCATION_HIERARCHY
Value: Hierarchy
Separator Char: Semi-Colon (;)

Save the hierarchy, re-select it and under Actions, click on BUILD. Now the system will build an appropriate hierarchy which can be viewed under Access Governance Core > Manage > Groups.

So what can we do now?

Well... let's assume we want everyone in the United Kingdom to be assigned a role. Create and publish role called "United Kingdom Users". Now configure the role by updating the Org Units it is assigned to (ignoring the fact it is called Org Units which will no doubt be resolved in a future fix pack!). Add an "Org Unit" of type Location Hierarchy, navigate down through the hierarchy and find United Kingdom, click on OK and complete the following:

Default: Yes, and align users
Visibility Violation: No
Enabled: Yes
Hierarchy: Checked

That's it... every user under the United Kingdom hierarchy will automatically be assigned the United Kingdom Users role.