Hexa

Table of Contents

• Hexa Policy Orchestrator
  • Getting Started
    • Build the Hexa image
    • Run the Policy Orchestrator

  • Application descriptions
    • Example workflow

  • Getting involved

Hexa Policy Orchestrator

Hexa Policy Orchestrator enables you to manage all of your policies consistently across software providers so that you can unify access policy management. The below diagram describes the current provider architecture.

Getting Started

The Hexa project contains three applications

• Policy Orchestrator with policy translations
• Demo Policy Administrator
• Demo web application

To get started with running these, clone or download the codebase from GitHub to your local machine:

cd $HOME/workspace # or similar
git clone git@github.com:hexa-org/policy-orchestrator.git

Install the following dependencies.

• Go 1.20
• Pack
• Docker Desktop

NOTE:

These packages, along with a number of supporting software utilities, may be installed via ./bin/pkg.d/setup.sh.

Additionally, once that setup script has been run, the pkg bash CLI is made available and may be executed from anywhere within the repository. Try pkg --help, for example.

Task: Build the Hexa image

Build a Hexa image with pack. The newly created image will contain the policy administrator web application, policy orchestrator server, and demo application.

pack build hexa --builder heroku/buildpacks:20

NOTE:

Assuming previous execution of the "setup" script above, this task may be run from anywhere in the repository as pkg build.

Task: Prepare the Database

The Hexa applications use PostgreSQL. A number of scripts and TLS files need to be installed/executed when running in Docker (see below). So...

chmod 775 ./databases/docker_support/initdb.d/create-databases.sh
chmod 775 ./databases/docker_support/migrate-databases.sh
chmod 600 ./databases/docker_support/ca-cert.pem
chmod 600 ./databases/docker_support/client-cert.pem
chmod 600 ./databases/docker_support/client-key.pem

NOTE:

Assuming previous execution of the "setup" script above, this task will be run as part of pkg serve, executable from anywhere in the repository.

Task: Run the Policy Orchestrator

Run all the applications with Docker Compose.

On Apple Silicon M1 (and M2) ARM

DOCKER_DEFAULT_PLATFORM=linux/amd64 docker-compose up

Others

docker-compose up

NOTE:

Assuming previous execution of the "setup" script above, this task may be run from anywhere in the repository as pkg build.

Application Descriptions

Docker runs the following applications:

• hexa-orchestrator

  Runs on localhost:8885. The main application that manages IDQL policy across various platforms and communicates with the various platform interfaces, converting IDQL policy to and from the respective platform types.

• hexa-admin

  Runs on localhost:8884. An example application demonstrating the latest interactions with the policy orchestrator.

• hexa-demo

  Runs on localhost:8886. A demo application used to highlight enforcing of both coarse and fine-grained policy. The application integrates with platform authentication/authorization proxies, Google IAP for example, for coarse-grained access and the Open Policy Agent (OPA) for fine-grained policy access.

• OPA server

  Runs on localhost:8887. The Open Policy Agent (OPA) server used to demonstrate fine-grained policy management. IDQL policy is represented as data and interpreted by the Rego expression language.

• hexa-demo-config

  Runs on localhost:8889. The bundle HTTP server from which the OPA server can download the bundles of policy and data from. See OPA bundles for more info.

Example Workflow

Fine-grained policy management with OPA.

Using the hexa-admin application available via docker-compose, upload an OPA integration configuration file. The file describes the location of the IDQL policy. An example integration configuration file may be found in deployments/opa-server/example.

Once configured, IDQL policy for the hexa-demo application can be modified on the Applications page. The hexa-admin communicates the changes to the hexa-orchestrator, or "Policy Management Point (PMP)", which then updates the hexa-demo-config bundle server, making the updated policy available to the OPA server.

OPA, the "Policy Decision Point (PDP)", periodically reads config from the hexa-demo-config bundle server and allows or denies access requests based on the IDQL policy. Decision enforcement is handled within the hexa-demo application or "Policy Enforcement Point (PEP)".

The Hexa Demo architecture may be visualized as follows:

Getting involved

Take a look at our product backlog where we maintain a fresh supply of good first issues. In addition to enhancement requests, feel free to post any bugs you may find.

• Backlog

Here are a few additional resources for those interested in contributing to the Hexa project:

• Contributing
• Code of Conduct
• Development
• Security

This repository also includes documentation for the current demo deployment infrastructure.