Challenges in authorization management
Using eCATT to maintain roles
Before you can start upgrading the suggestion values and roles, you need to consider a few things. SAP Note 1539556 lists all questions and answers about the administration of proposed values. Already at the start of the transaction SU25 you will be alerted in a pop-up window to the SAP notice 440231 (upgrade preparation for the profile generator). This note provides information on recommended revisions for certain SAP base versions and recommendations for additional guidance, which are listed in the Annexe.
A troublesome scenario you're probably familiar with: You will soon be going live with a new business process and must now derive your roles in 97 accounting circles. Here eCATT can make your life easier. It's time again: If you don't have anyone in your department who likes to press the Copy button for several hours in the PFCG transaction, replace the Derive shortcut, and then customise the Organisation Levels (Origen) in the new roles on the Permissions tab (repeatedly connected to memory), the job will hang on you. Because there is hardly anything more boring, at the latest after one hour the first errors creep in. Whenever you have to roll out new roles, for example for your new premium business, to all your divisions, plants, etc. , the creation of the derived roles is tedious - because SAP does not offer smart mass maintenance. The SAP standard offers various ways to record and play on a massive scale. These tools are generally available for all operations in the SAP system, not just for role maintenance. Therefore, they are also more complex to operate, in order to be able to cover as flexibly as possible all possible application scenarios. eCATT is also no exception, so many users are still afraid to use it. But we can tell you from experience: After the second or third time, the creation of the test scripts is so quick that you'll wonder why you haven't always done it this way.
Use system recommendations to introduce security
When the auth/authorisation_trace parameter is turned on, external services are written to the USOBHASH table and permission checks are logged in the USOB_AUTHVALTRC table. You can now use the contents of this table to apply the checked objects and values from the trace to the suggestion values in the transaction SU24. Because it is a dynamic profile parameter, it is reset when the application server is launched. Now open the transaction SU24 and you will find your own UIK component as an external service. Double-clicking on this service will tell you that no suggestion values have been maintained there. You can apply these suggested values from the USOB_AUTHVALTRC table. Here you should at least maintain the UIU_COMP authorization object so that this information is loaded into the PFCG role as soon as you include the external service in your role menu.
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If you do not want to use reference users, you can hide the Reference User field for additional permissions via a standard variant for the transaction SU01. The necessary steps are described in SAP Note 330067.
With "Shortcut for SAP systems" you can automate the assignment of roles after a go-live.
SAP Note 788313 describes in detail the functional components of the time-space test and the additional logging and also serves as a "cookbook" to use in customer-specific developments.
To implement your own permission checks, it may be helpful to see how such checks have been implemented in the SAP standard.