Help Center/ Data Security Center/ API Reference/ Permissions and Supported Actions/ Introduction to Permissions Policies and Supported Actions
Updated on 2026-01-13 GMT+08:00
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Introduction to Permissions Policies and Supported Actions

This section describes how to use IAM to implement fine-grained permissions control over DSC. If your Huawei Cloud account does not require fine-grained permissions control, you can skip this section.

With IAM, you can control access to specific Huawei Cloud resources from principals (IAM users, user groups, agencies, or trust agencies). IAM supports both role-based access control (RBAC) and attribute-based access control (ABAC).

The following table describes the main differences.

Table 1 Differences between role/policy-based and identity policy-based authorization

Name

Authorization Using

Permission

Authorization Method

Scenario

Role/Policy-based authorization

User-permissions-authorization scope
  • System role
  • System-defined policy
  • Custom policy

Assigning roles or policies to principals

To authorize a user, you need to add it to a user group first and then specify the scope of authorization. It provides a limited number of condition keys and cannot meet the requirements of fine-grained permissions control. This method is suitable for small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Identity policy-based authorization

User-policies
  • System-defined identity policies
  • Custom identity policies
  • Assigning identity policies to principals
  • Attaching identity policies to principals

You can authorize a user by attaching an identity policy to it. User-specific authorization and a variety of key conditions allow for more fine-grained permissions control. However, this model can be hard to set up. It requires a certain amount of expertise and is suitable for medium- and large-sized enterprises.

Assume that you want to grant IAM users permission to create ECSs in CN North-Beijing4 and OBS buckets in CN South-Guangzhou. With role/policy-based authorization, the administrator needs to create two custom policies and assign both to the IAM users. With identity policy-based authorization, the administrator only needs to create one custom identity policy and configure the condition key g:RequestedRegion for the policy, and then attach the policy to the users or grant the users the permissions.

Policies and actions in the two authorization models are not interoperable. You are advised to use ABAC.

If you use IAM users in your account to call an API, the IAM users must be granted the required permissions. The permissions required for calling an API are determined by the actions supported by the API. Only users who have been granted permissions allowing the actions can call the API successfully.

Assume that an IAM user wants to call an API to query the DSC scan task list. With RBAC, the IAM user must be granted the permissions allowing for action dsc:scanTask:list. With identity policy-based authorization, the IAM user must have the dsc:scanTask:list action in their permissions to call the API.