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;

To delete a user use:

DROP USER user_name;

Password encryption algorithm

You can choose between bcrypt, sha256, and sha256-multiple password encryption algorithms. SHA256 offers better performance compared to the more secure but less performant bcrypt. Change the encryption algorithm by setting the --password-encryption-algorithm configuration option to the preferred value.

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, STATS, AUTH, REPLICATION, READ_FILE, DURABILITY, FREE_MEMORY, TRIGGER, STREAM, CONFIG, CONSTRAINT, DUMP, MODULE_READ, MODULE_WRITE, WEBSOCKET, TRANSACTION_MANAGEMENT and STORAGE_MODE.

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;

Owners

The privileges of the owners of streams and triggers are propagated to the corresponding query executions:

• in case of streams for the queries returned by the transformations
• in case of triggers for trigger statements

This means the execution of the queries will fail if the owner doesn't have the required privileges. There are a few important details:

• If there are no existing users, no privilege check is performed similarly to regular queries.
• If a stream or trigger is created without using a logged-in user session, the owner will be Null. From the point when the first user is created such streams and triggers will fail because the lack of owner is treated as a user without any privileges, so no queries are allowed to be executed.
• Currently, there is no way of changing the owner. The only workaround for this is to delete the stream or trigger and then create it again with another user.

Streams

The user who executes the CREATE STREAM query is going to be the owner of the stream. Authentication and authorization are not supported in Memgraph Community, thus the owner will always be Null, and the privileges are not checked in Memgraph Community. In Memgraph Enterprise the privileges of the owner are used when executing the queries returned from a transformation, in other words, the execution of the queries will fail if the owner doesn't have the required privileges. More information about how the owner affects the stream can be found in the reference guide.

Label-based access control

Sometimes, disabling users from executing certain commands is too restrictive. Label-based access control enables database administrators to disable users from viewing or manipulating nodes with certain labels and relationships of certain types.

Label-based permissions are divided into 4 hierarchical parts or levels:

• NOTHING - denies user visibility and manipulation over nodes and relationships
• READ - grants the user visibility over nodes and relationships
• UPDATE - grants the user visibility and the ability to edit nodes and relationships
• CREATE_DELETE - grants the user visibility, editing, creation, and deletion of a node or a relationship

Node permissions

Granting a certain set of node permissions can be done similarly to the clause privileges using the following command:

GRANT permission_level ON LABELS label_list TO user_or_role;

with the legend:

• permission_level is either NOTHING, READ, UPDATE or CREATE_DELETE
• label_list is a set of node labels, separated with a comma and with a colon in front of each label (e.g. :L1), or * for specifying all labels in the graph
• user_or_role is the already created user or role in Memgraph

For example, granting a READ permission on labels L1 and L2 would be written as:

GRANT READ ON LABELS :L1, :L2 TO charlie;

while granting both READ and EDIT permissions for all labels in the graph, would be written as:

GRANT UPDATE ON LABELS * TO charlie;

For denying visibility to a node, the command would be written as:

GRANT NOTHING ON LABELS :L1 TO charlie;

Relationship permissions

Relationship permission queries are in essence the same as node permission queries, with the one difference that the name of the relationship type is EDGE_TYPE and not LABEL.

Granting a certain set of edge type permissions can be done similarly to the clause privileges by issuing the following command:

GRANT permission_level ON EDGE_TYPES edge_type_list TO user_or_role;

with the same legend as the node permissions.

For example, granting a READ permission on relationship type :CONNECTS would be written as:

GRANT READ ON EDGE_TYPES :CONNECTS TO charlie;

Revoking label-based permissions

To revoke any of the label-based permissions, users can use one of the following commands:

REVOKE (LABELS | EDGE_TYPES) label_or_edge_type_list FROM user_or_role

where:

• label_or_edge_type_list is a list of labels or edge types with a colon in front of each label or edge type (or * for specifying all labels or edge types)
• user_or_role is the existing user or role in Memgraph

Show privileges for label-based access control

To check which privileges an existing user or role has in Memgraph, it is enough to write

SHOW PRIVILEGES FOR user_or_role;

and all the values of clause privileges, as well as label-based permissions will be displayed.