Access Control Overview¶

Access control lets you create a policy to control who can interact with a resource within the PHC. PHC uses Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) to support both simple and complex access control needs.

PHC access control is cumulative. All the permissions granted are allowed. If two permissions grant different levels of access, the most permissive access takes effect.

For example, let's say you have a user who wants to download a file from a specific PHC project. Under the ABAC model, the user is performing an action on a resource in an environment. The user, action, resource, and environment all have attributes or key/value pairs. A policy contains the attributes that define the privileges of the user.

There are some actions that all users in any group within a PHC account can perform via the API regardless of the ABAC policies in place. Note that these actions cannot be performed via the User Interface and no data associated with any subject is exposed by these actions:

• Read all consents in all projects
• Read all surveys in all projects
• Read all insights layouts, subject viewer layouts, and subject search saved searches
• List all projects including their name and description and other associated metadata

For detailed information on ABAC, see sections 1 and 2 of the NIST's Guide to Attribute Based Access Control.

Default Policies¶

PHC comes set up with three access control policies and each existing policy has a matching group. Adding a user to the group gives the user the permissions from the policy. Users in the Administrators group can update and delete existing groups and policies and create new ones. If an administrator needs additional permissions not already included in the Administrator Access policy, they have the permissions needed to add to the policy or create a new policy.

To add an existing PHC user to a group, complete the Add a user to a group with the Users tab. To add a new PHC user to a group, complete the Invite a user to a group with email.

Sample Policy¶

Access control allows you to create custom policies for the specific needs of your project. The example below shows a simple policy designed to allow subjects of a study to read their own data. It contains the three main components required to create a PHC access control policy. These components correspond to the ABAC model.

• Permissions - Permissions are the set of actions allowed by the policy. The only action allowed in the sample policy is to Read Data. This permission is further limited by restricting the policy member's action to their own data.
• Resource - Resource options pertain to the resource being accessed. In PHC, the resource can be defined by belonging to a specific dataset or by being a specific type of resource.
• User - The user specifies which people are members of the policy. Group membership defines these members. In our example, a researcher created the group Gradibus Subjects and sent a PHC group invitation email to the research subjects.

ABAC Tables¶

The following tables provide information on PHC access control components.

Privileges and Permission¶

Resource Types¶

You can restrict the Data Access privileges (Create Data, View Data, Update Data and Delete Data) by resource types.