Permission System

Current permission system is designed around access levels and single file permission settings.

There are different access levels for different users, which determine what operations they can perform on files and directories. Higher access levels grant more permissions.

• admin/all: all permissions including GET/PUT/POST/DELETE and listing directories.
• write: same as admin except for directory configuration file.
• read: only GET permission and listing directories.
• none: no permissions as above, but may have GET permission on files via direct link, depending on the file and path-owner's permission settings (refer to the section below).

INFO

directory path ends with / and file does not end with /.

User Roles

There are three user roles in the system: Admin, Normal User, and Virtual User

• A normal user have all permissions of the files and directories under its path (starting with /<user>/).
• A virtual user doesn't have it's own path.
• Admins have admin permissions of all files and directories.

Users are like "buckets" or "access keys" to some extent

Normal users are like "buckets" that own files and directories.
Virtual users are like "access keys" that have expiry time and limited access to some users' paths.

Below sections only discuss normal users and admins. For virtual users, please refer to the Virtual User document.

Ownership

There are two types of ownership for files (terms used in permission checks):

• file-owner: the user who created the file.
• path-owner: the user under whose path the file is stored (i.e. /<username>/...).

The owner always has all permissions of the file.

INFO

A file is owned by the user who created it. move will change the owner of the file. copy will create a new file owned by the user who performed the copy.

Peer Users

The user can have multiple peer users. The peer user can have read or write access to the user's path, depending on the access level set when adding the peer user.

INFO

Peer relations can be overridden by single directory permission settings, please refer to the Single Directory Configuration document for more details.

Move/Copy Permission

When moving or copying files, the user must have write permission of the corresponding paths.

• move operation also requires write permission of both the source and destination paths.
• copy operation does not require write permission of the source path.

Non-peer and public access

NOTE

This section discusses scenarios where the user is neither a peer of the path owner nor a logged-in user (i.e., guest or public access). It focuses on permissions for files and directories under other users' paths.

Users who are not logged in and are not peers of the path owner have limited access to files and directories under the users' paths. Specifically, they only have none permissions and cannot list directories. For directy access via file link, their permissions depend on the file's permission settings, as described below.

File access with GET permission

For accessing file content via direct link, the user must have GET permission of the file, which is determined by the permission field of both the path-owner and the file.

There are four types of permissions: unset, public, protected, private. Non-admin users can access files based on:

• If the file is public, then all users can access it.
• If the file is protected, then only the logged-in user can access it.
• If the file is private, then only the owner/path-owner can access it.
• If the file is unset, then the file's permission is inherited from the path-owner's permission.
• If both the path-owner and the file have unset permission, then the file is public.

Summary

For quick reference, here is a summary table of the permission system:

Note

The table assumes the user is accessing files/directories under another user's path (The path-owner always has all permissions under its own path). The permission is considered in the order of left to right, and the first matching condition applies.

Permission	Admin	Peer-w	Peer-r	File Owner	Non-peer user / Guest
GET	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Dep.
PUT/POST	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No
DELETE file	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	No
DELETE dir	Yes	Yes	No	No	No
move	Yes	Yes	No	Dep.	No
copy	Yes	Yes	Dep.	Dep.	No
list	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No

Capitilized methods are HTTP methods.
"Dep." means "Depends on file" or "Depends on source and destination".