Permission Management

If you need to assign different permissions to employees in your enterprise to access your VPN resources on Huawei Cloud, Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a good choice for fine-grained permissions management. IAM provides identity authentication, permissions management, and access control, helping you securely manage access to your resources.

With IAM, you can use your Huawei Cloud account to create IAM users, and assign permissions to the users to control their access to specific Huawei Cloud resources. For example, some software developers in your enterprise need to use VPN resources but should not be allowed to delete them or perform any high-risk operations. In this scenario, you can create IAM users for the software developers and grant them only the permissions required for using VPN resources.

If your Huawei Cloud account does not need individual IAM users for permissions management, you may skip over this topic.

IAM is free. You pay only for the resources in your account. For more information about IAM, see What Is IAM?.

VPN Permissions

By default, new IAM users do not have permissions assigned. You need to add a user to one or more groups, and attach permissions policies or roles to these groups. Users inherit permissions from the groups to which they are added and can perform specified operations on cloud services based on the permissions.

VPN is a project-level service deployed in specific physical regions. To assign VPN permissions to a user group, specify the scope as region-specific projects and select projects for the permissions to take effect. If All projects is selected, the permissions will take effect for the user group in all region-specific projects. When accessing VPN, the users need to switch to a region where they have been authorized to use this service.

You can grant permissions by using roles or policies.

Roles: A type of coarse-grained authorization mechanism that defines permissions related to user responsibilities. There are only a limited number of roles for granting permissions to users. Some roles depend other roles to take effect. When you assign such roles to users, remember to assign the roles they depend on. However, roles are not an ideal choice for fine-grained authorization and secure access control.
Policies: a type of fine-grained authorization mechanism that defines permissions required to perform operations on specific cloud resources under certain conditions. This mechanism allows for more flexible policy-based authorization, meeting requirements for secure access control. For example, you can grant VPN users only the permissions required for managing a certain type of ECSs.

Table 1 lists all system-defined roles and permissions supported by VPN.

**Table 1** VPN system-defined roles and permissions
System Role/Policy Name	Description	Dependency
VPN Administrator	All operations on VPN resources. Users with this permission have the VPC Administrator and Tenant Guest permissions by default. VPC Administrator: project-level policy, which is selected in the same project as VPN Administrator. Tenant Guest: project-level policy, which is selected in the same project as VPN Administrator.	-
VPN FullAccess	Full permissions for VPN.	To perform the following operations, you need to configure the VPC Administrator and Tenant Guest permissions in addition to the VPN FullAccess permission: Creating VPN connections
VPN ReadOnlyAccess	Read-only permissions on VPN resources. Users who have these permissions can only view information about VPN resources.	N/A

Table 2 lists the common operations supported by each system-defined policy of VPN. Select the permissions as needed.

**Table 2** Common operations supported by **VPN Administrator**
Operation	VPN Administrator	VPN FullAccess	VPN ReadOnlyAccess
Creating a VPN gateway	Supported	√	×
Viewing a VPN gateway	Supported	√	√
Modifying a VPN gateway	Supported	√	×
Deleting a VPN gateway	Supported	√	×
Creating a VPN connection	Supported	×	×
Viewing a VPN connection	Supported	√	√
Modifying a VPN connection	Supported	×	×
Deleting a VPN connection	Supported	×	×
Creating a customer gateway	√	√	×
Viewing a customer gateway	√	√	√
Modifying a customer gateway	√	√	×
Deleting a customer gateway	√	√	×