docs/source/security/minio-identity-management/user-management.rst

User Management

minio

Table of Contents

Overview

A MinIO 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 MinIO user.

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

MinIO by default denies access to all actions or resources not explicitly allowed by a user's assigned or inherited policies <minio-policy>. You must either explicitly assign a policy <minio-policy> describing the user's authorized actions and resources or assign the user to groups <minio-groups> which have associated policies. See minio-access-management for more information.

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

• minio-external-identity-management-openid
• minio-external-identity-management-ad-ldap

Enabling external identity management disables the MinIO internal IDP, with the exception of creating service accounts <minio-idp-service-account>.

Service Accounts

MinIO service accounts are child identities of an authenticated MinIO user, including externally managed identities <minio-authentication-and-identity-management>. Each service account inherits its privileges based on the policies <minio-policy> attached to it's parent user or those groups in which the parent user has membership. Service accounts also support an optional inline policy which further restricts access to a subset of actions and resources available to the parent user.

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

You can create service accounts using either the MinIO Console <minio-console> or by using the mc admin user svcacct add command.

Service Accounts are for Programmatic Access

Service Accounts support programmatic access by applications. You cannot use a Service Account to log into the MinIO Console.

MinIO root User

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

• MINIO_ROOT_USER
• MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD

Rotating the root user credentials requires updating either or both variables for all MinIO 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.

• MinIO strongly discourages using the root user for regular client access regardless of the environment (development, staging, or production).
• MinIO 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, minio defaults to minioadmin and minioadmin as the access key and secret key respectively. MinIO strongly discourages use of the default credentials regardless of deployment environment.

Deprecation of Legacy Root User Environment Variables

MinIO RELEASE.2021-04-22T15-44-28Z and later deprecates the following variables used for setting or updating root user credentials:

• MINIO_ACCESS_KEY to the new access key.
• MINIO_SECRET_KEY to the new secret key.
• MINIO_ACCESS_KEY_OLD to the old access key.
• MINIO_SECRET_KEY_OLD to the old secret key.

User Management

Create a User

Use the mc admin user add command to create a new user on the MinIO deployment:

mc admin user add ALIAS ACCESSKEY SECRETKEY

• Replace ALIAS <mc admin user add TARGET> with the alias <mc alias> of the MinIO deployment.
• Replace ACCESSKEY <mc admin user add ACCESSKEY> with the access key for the user. MinIO allows retrieving the access key after user creation through the mc admin user info command.
• Replace SECRETKEY <mc admin user add SECRETKEY> with the secret key for the user. MinIO 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 mc admin policy set to associate a MinIO Policy Based Access Control <minio-policy> to the new user. The following command assigns the built-in readwrite policy:

mc admin policy set ALIAS readwrite user=USERNAME

Replace USERNAME with the ACCESSKEY created in the previous step.

Delete a User

Use the mc admin user remove command to remove a user on a MinIO deployment:

mc admin user remove ALIAS USERNAME

• Replace ALIAS <mc admin user remove TARGET> with the alias <mc alias> of the MinIO deployment.
• Replace USERNAME <mc admin user remove USERNAME> with the name of the user to remove.