Permissions Management

If you need to assign different permissions to personnel in your enterprise to access your VPN resources purchased 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 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 a free service. You only pay for the resources in your account.

For more information about IAM, see IAM Service Overview.

VPN Permissions

New IAM users do not have any permissions assigned by default. You need to first add them to one or more groups and attach policies or roles to these groups. The users then inherit permissions from the groups and can perform specified operations on cloud services based on the permissions they have been assigned.

VPN is a project-level service deployed for specific regions. When you set Scope to Region-specific projects and select the specified projects in the specified regions, the users only have permissions for VPN in the selected projects. If you set Scope to All resources, users have permissions for VPN in all region-specific projects. When accessing VPN, the users need to switch to the authorized region.

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 users only permissions to manage VPN resources of a certain type.

Table 1 lists all system-defined permissions for VPN.

**Table 1** System-defined permissions for VPN
System Role/Policy Name	Description	Dependency
VPN Administrator	Administrator permissions for VPN. Users with these permissions can perform all operations on VPN. Users with these permissions 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 gateways 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	Enterprise Edition VPN: √ Classic VPN: ×	×
Viewing a VPN gateway	Supported	√	√
Modifying a VPN gateway	Supported	Enterprise Edition VPN: √ Classic VPN: ×	×
Deleting a VPN gateway	Supported	Enterprise Edition VPN: √ Classic VPN: ×	×
Creating a VPN connection	Supported	Enterprise Edition VPN: × Classic VPN: √	×
Viewing a VPN connection	Supported	√	√
Modifying a VPN connection	Supported	Enterprise Edition VPN: × Classic VPN: √	×
Deleting a VPN connection	Supported	Enterprise Edition VPN: × Classic VPN: √	×
Creating a customer gateway	√	Enterprise Edition VPN: √ Classic VPN: N/A	×
Viewing a customer gateway	√	Enterprise Edition VPN: √ Classic VPN: N/A	√
Modifying a customer gateway	√	Enterprise Edition VPN: √ Classic VPN: N/A	×
Deleting a customer gateway	√	Enterprise Edition VPN: √ Classic VPN: N/A	×