Help Center/ Cloud Firewall/ API Reference/ Permissions and Supported Actions/ Introduction
Updated on 2025-11-10 GMT+08:00
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Introduction

You can use Identity and Access Management (IAM) for fine-grained permissions management of your CFW resources. If your Huawei ID does not need individual IAM users, you can skip this section.

With IAM, you can control access to specific Huawei Cloud resources. IAM supports role/policy-based authorization and identity policy-based authorization.

The following table describes the differences between these two authorization models.

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

Name

Relationship

Permission

Auth service

Application Scenario

Role/Policy-based authorization

User-permission-authorization scope
  • System-defined roles
  • System policy
  • Custom policies

Granting a role or policy to a subject

To authorize a user, add it to a user group and specify the scope of authorization. It is hard to provide fine-grained permissions control using authorization granted by user groups and a limited number of condition keys. This method is suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises.

Identity policy-based authorization

User-policy
  • System policy
  • Custom policies
  • Granting a role or policy to a subject
  • Attaching a policy to a subject

To authorize a user, grant 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 the permissions needed 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 policy, configure the condition key g:RequestedRegion for the policy, and then attach the policy to the users or grant the users the access permissions to the specified regions. Identity policy-based authorization is more flexible than role/policy-based authorization.

Policies/identity policies and actions in the two authorization models are not interoperable. You are advised to use the identity policy-based authorization model.

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

Assume that an IAM user wants to call an API to query the cloud firewall list. With policy-based authorization, the IAM user must be granted the permissions allowing for action cfw:instance:list. With identity policy-based authorization, the IAM user must be granted the permissions allowing for action cfw:instance:listInstance.

Parent Topic: Permissions and Supported Actions