RBAC roles

Roles are the mechanism used to assign authorizations to a user and to group a set of system administration tasks together. An AIX® role is primarily a container for a collection of authorizations.

AIX supports the direct assignment of authorizations to a role or the indirect assignment of authorizations through a sub-role. A sub-role can be specified for a role in the rolelist attribute of a role. Configuring a role to have a designated sub-role effectively assigns all of the authorizations in the sub-role to the role.

Assigning a role to a user allows the user to access the role and use the authorizations that are contained in the role. A system administrator can assign a role to multiple users and can assign multiple roles to a user. A user who has been assigned multiple roles can activate more than one role (up to a maximum of eight roles) simultaneously if necessary to perform system management functions.

AIX provides a set of predefined roles for system management. However it is expected that customers will need to create their own custom roles or modify the existing predefined roles. Several role-management commands are available to list, create, modify, and remove AIX roles. Roles can be created with the mkrole command, modified with the chrole command, removed with the rmrole command, and displayed with the lsrole command.