If you happen to learn some of my earlier weblog posts, that I automated the setup (onboarding) for workshops and hackathons. To date, operating my Terraform scripts to deploy sources and privileges meant permitting entry to them. Due to a (comparatively) new IBM Cloud safety characteristic known as time-based restrictions, I can decouple the deployment course of from when entry is feasible.
On this weblog publish, I’m going to offer a brief introduction to time-based restrictions. Then, I’ll stroll you thru my use case and the way I applied it:
Overview: Time-based restrictions
Id and Entry Administration (IAM) means that you can defend your IBM Cloud sources. You’ve most likely discovered to make the most of entry teams, trusted profiles, service and person identities and easy methods to assign entry. By including time-based restrictions, you may scope these entry insurance policies additional to a particular time and date vary (as soon as) or to recurring home windows. The latter may very well be upkeep home windows—for instance, over the weekend or particular hours throughout the evening. Typical examples for single occasions (as soon as) are ad-hoc upkeep work for some hours or some scheduled longer duties with a given begin and finish.
When creating a brand new coverage, now you can optionally add situations for when the entry must be granted. Within the IBM Cloud console’s browser UI, that elective step is obtainable (see the picture beneath). I might have additionally utilized the CLI or API/SDK, however for my automated setup of workshop sources, I picked Terraform:
Situation: Workshops
As mentioned in my weblog “Secure Onboarding for Your Workshops and Hackathons,” I generally have to run short-lived initiatives. For these initiatives, it’s essential to automate the onboarding and offboarding to at all times arrange the workshop setting the identical approach. Individuals ought to have entry privileges associated to their function. To date, I might deploy the sources utilizing Terraform (together with all privileges) and destroy sources and entry after the occasion.
By including time-based restrictions to the entry insurance policies, I’m able to grant entry in levels. As soon as once more, I deploy every little thing with Terraform, together with IAM privileges. Nonetheless, the time-related situations make it possible for the insurance policies are solely lively between the beginning and finish occasions. They may very well be set to align with the workshop begin and the official finish (or some hours/days later). With out destroying the sources, entry to them is robotically reduce off after the workshop.
The next exhibits the sample conditions that I added to the shared Terraform code. You could find all of it within the GitHub repository cloud-project-onboarding-terraform and the department workshop_hackathon. The screenshot on the high of this weblog publish exhibits the identical situations within the IBM Cloud console.
rule_conditions {
key = "{{setting.attributes.current_date_time}}"
operator = "dateTimeGreaterThanOrEquals"
worth = ["2023-07-19T09:00:00+01:00"]
}
rule_conditions {
key = "{{setting.attributes.current_date_time}}"
operator = "dateTimeLessThanOrEquals"
worth = ["2023-07-26T09:00:00+01:00"]
}
rule_operator = "and"
sample = "time-based-conditions:as soon as"Conclusion
Time-based restrictions are an incredible addition to the prevailing IBM Cloud security measures. They assist you to cut back assigned entry to a single time, date ranges or recurring upkeep home windows, thereby decreasing the assault floor. For my use case of automated onboarding and offboarding, the time-based restrictions permit me to decouple useful resource and privilege deployment from activating entry. This implies I’ve extra flexibility in when to carry out administrative duties.
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