ACL

Restrict access to a Service or a Route by whitelisting or blacklisting consumers using arbitrary ACL group names. This plugin requires an authentication plugin to have been already enabled on the Service or Route.

Terminology

• plugin: a plugin executing actions inside Kong before or after a request has been proxied to the upstream API.
• Service: the Kong entity representing an external upstream API or microservice.
• Route: the Kong entity representing a way to map downstream requests to upstream services.
• Upstream service: this refers to your own API/service sitting behind Kong, to which client requests are forwarded.

Configuration

This plugin is compatible with requests with the following protocols:

• http
• https

This plugin is partially compatible with DB-less mode.

Consumers and ACLs can be created with declarative configuration.

Admin API endpoints which do POST, PUT, PATCH or DELETE on ACLs will not work on DB-less mode.

Enabling the plugin on a Service

With a database

Configure this plugin on a Service by making the following request:

$ curl -X POST http://kong:8001/services/{service}/plugins \
    --data "name=acl"  \
    --data "config.whitelist=group1" \
    --data "config.whitelist=group2" \
    --data "config.hide_groups_header=true"

Without a database

Configure this plugin on a Service by adding this section to your declarative configuration file:

plugins:
- name: acl
  service: {service}
  config: 
    whitelist:
    - group1
    - group2
    hide_groups_header: true

{service} is the id or name of the Service that this plugin configuration will target.

Enabling the plugin on a Route

With a database

Configure this plugin on a Route with:

$ curl -X POST http://kong:8001/routes/{route}/plugins \
    --data "name=acl"  \
    --data "config.whitelist=group1" \
    --data "config.whitelist=group2" \
    --data "config.hide_groups_header=true"

Without a database

Configure this plugin on a Route by adding this section to your declarative configuration file:

plugins:
- name: acl
  route: {route}
  config: 
    whitelist:
    - group1
    - group2
    hide_groups_header: true

{route} is the id or name of the Route that this plugin configuration will target.

Global plugins

• Using a database, all plugins can be configured using the http://kong:8001/plugins/ endpoint.
• Without a database, all plugins can be configured via the plugins: entry on the declarative configuration file.

A plugin which is not associated to any Service, Route, or Consumer (or API, if you are using an older version of Kong) is considered "global", and will be run on every request. Read the Plugin Reference and the Plugin Precedence sections for more information.

Parameters

Here's a list of all the parameters which can be used in this plugin's configuration:

Note that the whitelist and blacklist models are mutually exclusive in their usage, as they provide complimentary approaches. That is, you cannot configure an ACL with both whitelist and blacklist configurations. An ACL with a whitelist provides a positive security model, in which the configured groups are allowed access to the resources, and all others are inherently rejected. By contrast, a blacklist configuration provides a negative security model, in which certain groups are explicitly denied access to the resource (and all others are inherently allowed).

Usage

In order to use this plugin, you need to properly have configured your Service or Route with an authentication plugin so that the plugin can identify who is the client Consumer making the request.

Associating Consumers

With a database

Once you have added an authentication plugin to a Service or a Route and you have created your Consumers, you can now associate a group to a Consumer using the following request:

$ curl -X POST http://kong:8001/consumers/{consumer}/acls \
    --data "group=group1"

consumer: The id or username property of the Consumer entity to associate the credentials to.

Without a database

You can create ACL objects via the acls: entry in the declarative configuration file:

acls:
- consumer: { consumer }
  group: group1

• consumer: The id or username property of the Consumer entity to associate the credentials to.
• group: The arbitrary group name to associate to the consumer.

You can have more than one group associated to a consumer.

Upstream Headers

When a consumer has been validated, the plugin will append a X-Consumer-Groups header to the request before proxying it to the upstream service, so that you can identify the groups associated with the consumer. The value of the header is a comma separated list of groups that belong to the consumer, like admin, pro_user.

This header will not be injected in the request to the upstream service if the hide_groups_header config flag is set to true.

Paginate through the ACLs

You can retrieve all the ACLs for all Consumers using the following request:

$ curl -X GET http://kong:8001/acls

{
    "total": 3,
    "data": [
        {
            "group": "foo-group",
            "created_at": 1511391159000,
            "id": "724d1be7-c39e-443d-bf36-41db17452c75",
            "consumer": { "id": "89a41fef-3b40-4bb0-b5af-33da57a7ffcf" }
        },
        {
            "group": "bar-group",
            "created_at": 1511391162000,
            "id": "0905f68e-fee3-4ecb-965c-fcf6912bf29e",
            "consumer": { "id": "c0d92ba9-8306-482a-b60d-0cfdd2f0e880" }
        },
        {
            "group": "baz-group",
            "created_at": 1509814006000,
            "id": "ff883d4b-aee7-45a8-a17b-8c074ba173bd",
            "consumer": { "id": "c0d92ba9-8306-482a-b60d-0cfdd2f0e880" }
        }
    ]
}

You can filter the list by consumer by using this other path:

$ curl -X GET http://kong:8001/consumers/{username or id}/acls

{
    "total": 1,
    "data": [
        {
            "group": "bar-group",
            "created_at": 1511391162000,
            "id": "0905f68e-fee3-4ecb-965c-fcf6912bf29e",
            "consumer": { "id": "c0d92ba9-8306-482a-b60d-0cfdd2f0e880" }
        }
    ]
}

username or id: The username or id of the consumer whose ACLs need to be listed

Retrieve the Consumer associated with an ACL

It is possible to retrieve a Consumer associated with an ACL using the following request:

curl -X GET http://kong:8001/acls/{id}/consumer

{
   "created_at":1507936639000,
   "username":"foo",
   "id":"c0d92ba9-8306-482a-b60d-0cfdd2f0e880"
}

id: The id property of the ACL for which to get the associated Consumer.