Metacoda Security Plug-ins: ACT Reviewer

The ACT Reviewer is one of the components included in our Metacoda Security Plug-ins software. This component provides comprehensive whole-of-server views of the use of Access Control Templates (ACTs) in your SAS® metadata security implementation.

You can use the ACT Reviewer to easily and efficiently review all of the Access Control Templates in your metadata: how they have been defined, where they have been applied, and how they may have been protected.

Applications

Some of the common types of questions administrators ask, which are easily answered with the ACT Reviewer, include:

• “We have a number of ACTs in our metadata. How do we find out where they have been used?”
• “We have heard that ACTs need to be protected to ensure that they can’t be modified by non-administrators attempting to elevate their own permissions. How do we easily find all of the ACTs where someone has forgotten to protect them with access controls?”
• “We are doing some housekeeping on our ACTs. Do we have any ACTs that have not been applied to any objects at all and remain unused? Do we have any empty ACTs that, even though they have been applied to objects, are redundant and are not actually doing anything useful?”
• “We would like to follow best practices with our ACTs by using only groups and eradicating references to individual users. How we easily find ACTs that refer to individual users?”
• “We have just finished a project to implement a new metadata security plan. How do we easily document the current implementation to verify against our plan. How do we document the implementation again at a later date to compare with the plan and see what has changed since the initial implementation?”

Features

These are some of the major features in the ACT Reviewer:

• ACTs Table: displays a list of all ACTs present in metadata together with summary information and indicators for those ACTs. The table can be customized by hiding or showing from the set of available table columns, re-ordering or re-sizing columns, and sorting rows by any of the available columns. The filter bar allows you to quickly find a specific ACT of interest.
• Permissions Tab: provides a definition view for the selected ACT: the group and/or user identities and the various permissions granted or denied.
• Objects Tab: displays a list of all of the objects that have been protected through the direct application of the selected ACT.
• ACT Protections Tab: shows any ACTs that may have been directly applied to the selected ACT in order to protect it.
• ACE Protections Tab: shows any explicit permissions, or Access Control Entries (ACEs), that may have been directly applied to the selected ACT in order to protect it.
• HTML Export: all of the information available in the ACT Reviewer can be easily exported in HTML format for documentation, audit and troubleshooting purposes.

Screenshots

Click on the thumbnails below to view full size screenshots of the Metacoda Security Plug-ins: ACT Reviewer.