8. Policies

Policies can be used to define the reaction and behaviour of the system.

Each policy defines the behaviour in a certain area, called scope. privacyIDEA knows the scopes:

You can define as many policies as you wish to. The logic of the policies in the scopes is additive.

../_images/policies.png

Policy Definition

Starting with privacyIDEA 2.5 you can use policy templates to ease the setup.

Each policy can contain the following attributes:

policy name

A unique name of the policy. The name is the identifier of the policy. If you create a new policy with the same name, the policy is overwritten.

scope

The scope of the policy as described above.

action

This is the important part of the policy. Each scope provides its own set of actions. An action describes that something is allowed or that some behaviour is configured. A policy can contain several actions. Actions can be of type boolean, string or integer. Boolean actions are enabled by just adding this action - like scope=user:action=disable, which allows the user to disable his own tokens. string and integer actions require an additional value - like scope=authentication:action='otppin=userstore'.

user

This is the user, for whom this policy is valid. Depending on the scope the user is either an administrator or a normal authenticating user.

If this field is left blank, this policy is valid for all users.

resolver

This policy will be valid for all users in this resolver.

If this field is left blank, this policy is valid for all resolvers.

Note

Starting with version 2.17 you can use the parameter check_all_resolvers. This is Check all possible resolvers of a user to match the resolver in this policy in the Web UI.

Assume a user user@realm1 is contained in resolver1 and resolver2 in the realm realm1, where resolver1 is the resolver with the highest priority. If the user authenticates as user@realm1, only policies for resolver1 will match, since the user is identified as user.resolver1@realm1.

If you also want to match a policy with resolver=resolver2, you need to select Check all possible resolvers in this policy. Thus this policy will match for all users, which are als contained in resolver2 as a secondary resolver.

realm

This is the realm, for which this policy is valid.

If this field is left blank, this policy is valid for all realms.

client

This is the requesting client, for which this action is valid. I.e. you can define different policies if the user access is allowed to manage his tokens from different IP addresses like the internal network or remotely via the firewall.

You can enter several IP addresses or subnets divided by comma (like 10.2.0.0/16, 192.168.0.1).

time

(added in privacyIDEA 2.12)

In the time field of a policy you can define a list of time ranges. A time range can consist of day of weeks (dow) and of times in 24h format. Possible values are:

<dow>: <hh>-<hh> <dow>: <hh:mm>-<hh:mm> <dow>-<dow>: <hh:mm>-<hh:mm>

You may use any combination of these. Like:

Mon-Fri: 8-18

to define certain policies to be active throughout working hours.

Note

If the time of a policy does not match, the policy is not found. Thus you can get effects you did not plan. So think at least twice before using time restricted policies.

priority

(added in privacyIDEA 2.23)

The priority field of policies contains a positive number and defaults to 1. In case of policy conflicts, policies with a lower priority number take precedence.

It can be used to resolve policy conflicts. An example is the passthru: Assume there are two passthru policies pol1 and pol2 that define different action values, e.g. pol1 defines passthru=userstore and pol2 defines passthru=radius1. If multiple policies match for an incoming authentication request, the priority value is used to determine the policy that should take precedence: Assuming pol1 has a priority of 3 and pol2 has a priority of 2, privacyIDEA will honor only the pol2 policy and authenticate the user against the RADIUS server radius1.

Policy conflicts can still occur if multiple policies with the same priority specify different values for the same action.