Security Overview

Open or closed? It's your call.

Confluence gives you the choice to make the site as open or as closed as you wish.

As a tool for communication and collaboration, Confluence is best used the more users you have participating on the site.

So it's advisable to design a security system that doesn't restrict users unless you can think of a very good reason for doing so. Because Confluence tracks histories of changes, it is easy to see who has changed what, and to reverse any edits if required.

There are three levels of permissions in Confluence.

Global permissions

Global permissions are site-level permissions.

This topic is covered in the Site Administrator's Guide.

The permission to create a new space or to administer one is granted by a site administrator from the global Administration Console.

'Attach Files to User Profile': Users with this permission can attach a picture to their user profile.
'Personal Space': Users with this permission can create a personal space within a Confluence site.
'Create Space(s)': Users with this permission can create new global spaces within a Confluence site. When a space is created, the creator automatically has the 'Admin' permission for that space.

'Administer Confluence': Users with this permission can perform functions relating to the management of the Confluence site as a whole.

Space permissions

Every space has its own, independent set of permissions. These permissions determine the access settings for different users of the space.

In order to assign these permissions, a user must be a space administrator (i.e. must have the 'Admin' permission) for that space.

See Users and Groups to learn how these permissions are assigned.

Page restrictions

You can further set page-level restrictions, if you have 'Restrict Pages' permission.

Page restrictions allow you to control who can view or edit individual pages. Page restrictions are set when editing a page from menus below the text-entry box.

How do space permissions and page restrictions work together?

Example: In the HR (Human Resources) space, everyone in the organisation has the 'View' space permission, but only the HR team has the 'Create' space permission (i.e. the ability to create and edit pages in the space). A member of the HR team starts to create a new page called 'Annual Leave Policy'. Because the page is not yet finished, she sets the page's 'Viewing' restriction so that only the HR team can view the page. When the page is finished, she will remove the 'Viewing' restriction so that everyone in the company can see the page.

How do space permissions and page restrictions affect links?

Space permissions and page restrictions affect how links between pages are displayed to a visitor:

if the link points to a page in a space to which the visitor does not have 'View' space permission, the link will not be rendered at all.
if the visitor has 'View' space permission, but page restrictions prohibit her from viewing the page, the link will be rendered but an 'Access Denied' message will be displayed.
if the visitor has 'View' space permission, and is not restricted from viewing the page, the link will display and behave as normal.

Links to attachments are also affected:

if the visitor does not have permission to view the page to which the attachment is attached, the link will not be rendered.

Warning

If you misconfigure a space so that nobody has access to administer it any more, you will need to have someone in the confluence-administrators group fix the permissions for you.

Page tree

RELATED TOPICS