Security (Enterprise)

Before reading this article we highly recommend going through a how-to guide on managing user privileges which contains more thorough explanations of the concepts behind openCypher commands listed in this article.

Users

Creating a user can be done by executing the following command:

  CREATE USER user_name [IDENTIFIED BY 'password'];

If the user should authenticate themself on each session, i.e. provide their password on each session, the part within the brackets is mandatory. Otherwise, the password is set to null and the user will be allowed to log-in using any password provided that they provide the correct username.

You can also set or alter a user's password anytime by issuing the following command:

  SET PASSWORD FOR user_name TO 'new_password';

Removing a user's password, i.e. allowing the user to log-in using any password can be done by setting it to null as follows:

  SET PASSWORD FOR user_name TO null;

User Roles

Each user can be assigned at most one user role. One can think of user roles as abstractions which capture the privilege levels of a set of users. For example, suppose that Dominik and Marko belong to upper management of a certain company. It makes sense to grant them a set of privileges that other users are not entitled to so, instead of granting those privileges to each of them, we can create a role with those privileges called manager which we assign to Dominik and Marko.

In other words, Each privilege that is granted to a user role is automatically granted to a user (unless it has been explicitly denied to that user). Similarly, each privilege that is denied to a user role is automatically denied to a user (even if it has been explicitly granted to that user).

Creating a user role can be done by executing the following command:

  CREATE ROLE role_name;

Assigning a user role to a certain user can be done by the following command:

  SET ROLE FOR user_name TO role_name;

Removing the role from the user can be done by:

  CLEAR ROLE FOR user_name;

Finally, showing all users that have a certain role can be done as:

  SHOW USERS FOR role_name;

Similarly, querying which role a certain user has can be done as:

  SHOW ROLE FOR user_name;

Privileges

At the moment, privileges are confined to users' abilities to perform certain OpenCypher queries. Namely users can be given permission to execute a subset of the following commands: CREATE, DELETE, MATCH, MERGE, SET, REMOVE, INDEX, AUTH, REPLICATION, READ_FILE, FREE_MEMORY, DURABILITY, TRIGGER, STREAM, and CONFIG.

Granting a certain set of privileges to a specific user or user role can be done by issuing the following command:

  GRANT privilege_list TO user_or_role;

For example, granting AUTH and INDEX privileges to users with the role moderator would be written as:

  GRANT AUTH, INDEX TO moderator:

Similarly, denying privileges is done using the DENY keyword instead of GRANT.

Both denied and granted privileges can be revoked, meaning that their status is not defined for that user or role. Revoking is done using the REVOKE keyword. The users should note that, although semantically unintuitive, the level of a certain privilege can be raised by using REVOKE. For instance, suppose a user has been denied a INDEX privilege, but the role it belongs to is granted that privilege. Currently, the user is unable to use indexing features, but, after revoking the user's INDEX privilege, they will be able to do so.

Finally, if you wish to grant, deny or revoke all privileges and find it tedious to explicitly list them, you can use the ALL PRIVILEGES construct instead. For example, revoking all privileges from user jdoe can be done with the following command:

  REVOKE ALL PRIVILEGES FROM jdoe;

Finally, obtaining the status of each privilege for a certain user or role can be done by issuing the following command:

  SHOW PRIVILEGES FOR user_or_role;