Feature Request: Evergreen "su/sudo" functionality
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Evergreen |
New
|
Wishlist
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
On the PINES staff we often have the need to see things from the perspective of the logged in user who is experiencing a problem. Currently, the only way to achieve this is to have the user share their login credentials, which is something we generally discourage for obvious security reasons. My idea is to have some sort of authentication mechanism by which a staff member with the proper permission could switch to another user (similar to "su" or "sudo" in the Unix/Linux world) and perform actions effectively *as* that user.
I can already one problem with this idea that would need to be solved before it could happen, including ensuring that auditor functions somehow "know" that the user was "su-ed" to when an action was performed for transparency's sake. There are probably other things I'm not thinking of.
Changed in evergreen: | |
importance: | Undecided → Wishlist |
tags: | added: authentication |
It's been a while, but most of this idea should be pretty simple using the AuthProxy.pm infrastructure. It was written in an attempt to be extensible, and one of the mock extensions we had way back one was called 'MasterKey', which essentially let you have one hard-coded password to authenticate *any* username. I could dig it up again as proof of concept, but there really wasn't a whole lot to it. One could also extend that idea in various ways (e.g. tie it to certain user passwords instead of hard-coding, etc.).
It isn't exactly what you are after, but it might be a place to start, even if just for development.