Introduction

JIRA: 

Several Airflow users have a need for more rigorous security in Airflow. Part of this involves authentication (authn) and authorization (authz) in Airflow's UI. The current security problems with Airflow's UI are:

1. Everything is under /admin
2. There is very limited authorization (authz) functionality
3. There is no auditing about who is triggering an action via the UI

The goal of this document is to address these issues.

Design

UI

The idea is to add a new endpoint called /dags, which is parallel to the /admin UI. This UI will use the same template as the existing DAGs UI in /admin. It will not, however, have any other tabs (Data Profiling, Browse, Admin).

We will need to lock down several pages in the Airflow view class. The pages that are exposed would be:

• /admin
• /admin/airflow/refresh
• /admin/airflow/tree
• /admin/airflow/graph
• /admin/airflow/duration
• /admin/airflow/landing_times
• /admin/airflow/gantt
• /admin/airflow/code
• /admin/airflow/task
• /admin/airflow/rendered
• /admin/airflow/log
• /admin/airflow/run
• /admin/airflow/xcom
• /admin/airflow/clear

And perhaps a couple others that I'm missing. The point is that we'd limit the access in the /dags view pretty severely.

Roles

We will introduce three levels of access:

• dag_viewer: Can see everything associated with a given DAG.
• dag_editor: Can edit the status of tasks in a DAG.
• dag_executor: Can click the 'Run' button on a task to have it triggered immediately. Only works for CeleryExecutor.

Groups

We will add the concept of groups. Users can be a member of a group. Both groups and members can be assigned DAG access permissions.

Implementation

Airflow already uses Flask-Login, so we can use this as the login mechanism. Airflow already has LDAP and Kerberos backends (as well as a GitHub backend).

We will need to:

1. Add the three Flask-Principal needs that map to the roles above
2. Hook Flask-Principal up to Flask-Login by sending a proper signals