Origin

This is Jim Wilson's idea on multi-tenant support in Score.

Terminology notes

• It is debatable whether “multi-tenant” is appropriate to describe what we want to accomplish here.

• “role” is used as a critical feature of authorization. Perhaps “group” would be more appropriate, or at least natural, but “role” is what Auth0 provides out-of-the-box, so we’ll go with it.

• “access BIEs” refers to creating, editing, viewing, and expressing BIEs (anything with BIEs)

Background

OAGi needs:

1. to enable multiple sets of users to use one Score instance

2. to be able to limit access to BIEs created by one set of users to members of that set, and other select sets as appropriate

Key points informing the design

1. Keep the implementation simple until such time that simple won’t work.

2. The following BIE-development roles/purposes must be supported

   1. OAGi develops BIEs for the public (e.g., SME Express Pack)

   2. OAGi develops BIEs for members only (none yet)

   3. Companies develop BIEs for their company only

   4. Companies develop BIEs for their industry (e.g., MilliporeSigma for the Biopharma industry)

   5. Industry associations or consortiums develop BIEs for their industry (e.g., AgGateway)

3. Except for 2.c., there is little/no risk for a company’s confidential information to be publicly disclosed.

4. In the case of 2.c. for company whose BIE design or documentation is highly sensitive, OAGi should advise them to use an on-prem instance.

5. Each BIE must be “in” a business context.

Design

Identity Provider

OAGi has an Auth0 account and has been using it for #E authentication and authorization. Following are a couple of screen captures that illustrate how it can be configured to support Score multi-tenant.

Multi-tenant Score design

1. Score will use Auth0 for authentication and authorization.

   1. Out of the box, Auth0 supports

      1. Managing users

      2. Managing roles

      3. Managing user-role relationships

2. Only administrators may manage business contexts in Score.

3. Each business context may have zero-to-many roles associated with it (managed only by administrators). See Figure 3.

4. A user may only access BIEs associated with business contexts that are associated with one of the user’s roles.