[Mailman-Developers] User-centric authentication and access control

[Barry Warsaw]

On Sep 02, 2015, at 06:17 AM, Andrew Stuart wrote:

>If users still sign in directly, what do you see the functionality of roles
>being from a Mailman perspective? I don’t see how they relate Mailman
>resources specifically.

Core really only has a small handful of roles, e.g. member, nonmember, list
moderator, list owner, domain owner, site owner.  We keep the number of roles
narrow to keep the responsibilities of the core narrow too.  These roles are
only ones that the core needs to make decisions about posting privileges,
moderation access, and configuration powers.

We can authenticate users against the password stored under their account in
the core via the REST API.  The trick is keeping this data in sync against
multiple components, such that if the user were to log into Postorius via
password, you'd want to (can do so currently) authenticate the password
against the one stored in the core.  We may want to associate other data with
users too, e.g. GPG pubkeys, which would allow authenticate via other
channels, such as email.

We could, and it might actually make sense, to get rid of authenticate in the
core.  We've longed talked about a user database component, which would store
accounts, passwords, and other authentication information.  The core would
then just be a client of this component.  We're not much past the discussion
phase with this idea.

Cheers,
-Barry