User Management

Overview

A Buckit user consists of a unique access key (username) and corresponding secret key (password). Clients must authenticate their identity by specifying both a valid access key (username) and the corresponding secret key (password) of an existing Buckit user.

Each user can have one or more assigned policies that explicitly list the actions and resources to which that user has access. Users can also inherit policies from the groups in which they have membership.

Buckit by default denies access to all actions or resources not explicitly allowed by a user’s assigned or inherited policies. You must either explicitly assign a policy describing the user’s authorized actions and resources or assign the user to groups which have associated policies. See Access Management for more information.

This page documents user management for the Buckit internal IDentity Provider (IDP). Buckit also external management of identities using either an OpenID Connect (OIDC) or Active Directory/LDAP IDentity Provider (IDP). For more information, see:

Enabling external identity management disables the Buckit internal IDP, with the exception of creating access keys.

Access Keys

Buckit Access Keys (formerly “Service Accounts”) are child identities of an authenticated Buckit user, including externally managed identities. Each access key inherits its privileges based on the policies attached to it’s parent user or those groups in which the parent user has membership. Access keys also support an optional inline policy which further restricts access to a subset of actions and resources available to the parent user.

A Buckit user can generate any number of access keys. This allows application owners to generate arbitrary access keys for their applications without requiring action from the Buckit administrators. Since the generated access keys have the same or fewer permissions as the parents, administrators can focus on managing the top-level parent users without micro-managing generated access keys.

You can create access keys by using the bm admin user svcacct add command. Identities created by these methods do not expire until you remove the access key or the parent account.

You can also create security token service accounts programmatically with the AssumeRole STS API endpoint. STS tokens default to expire in 1 hour, but you set expiration for up to 7 days from creation.

Access Keys are for Programmatic Access

Access Keys support programmatic access by applications. You cannot use an access key to log into the Admin Console.

Buckit root User

Buckit deployments have a root user with access to all actions and resources on the deployment, regardless of the configured identity manager. When a Buckit server first starts, it sets the root user credentials by checking the value of the following environment variables:

Rotating the root user credentials requires updating either or both variables for all Buckit servers in the deployment. Specify long, unique, and random strings for root credentials. Exercise all possible precautions in storing the access key and secret key, such that only known and trusted individuals who require superuser access to the deployment can retrieve the root credentials.

Buckit strongly discourages using the root user for regular client access regardless of the environment (development, staging, or production).
Buckit strongly recommends creating users such that each client has access to the minimal set of actions and resources required to perform their assigned workloads.

If these variables are unset, Buckit defaults to buckitadmin and buckitadmin as the access key and secret key respectively. Buckit strongly discourages use of the default credentials regardless of deployment environment.

User Management

Create a User

Use the bm admin user add command to create a new user on the Buckit deployment:

bm admin user add ALIAS ACCESSKEY SECRETKEY

Replace ALIAS with the alias of the Buckit deployment.
Replace ACCESSKEY with the access key for the user. Buckit allows retrieving the access key after user creation through the bm admin user info command.
Replace SECRETKEY with the secret key for the user. Buckit does not provide any method for retrieving the secret key once set.

Specify a unique, random, and long string for both the ACCESSKEY and SECRETKEY. Your organization may have specific internal or regulatory requirements around generating values for use with access or secret keys.

After creating the user, use bm admin policy attach to associate a Buckit Policy Based Access Control to the new user. The following command assigns the built-in readwrite policy:

bm admin policy attach ALIAS readwrite --user=USERNAME

Replace USERNAME with the ACCESSKEY created in the previous step.

Delete a User

Use the bm admin user rm command to remove a user on a Buckit deployment:

bm admin user rm ALIAS USERNAME

Replace ALIAS with the alias of the Buckit deployment.
Replace USERNAME with the name of the user to remove.