Extension:Lockdown

The Lockdown extension implements a way to restrict access to specific namespaces and special pages to a given set of user groups. This provides a more fine grained security model than the one provided by the default $wgGroupPermissions and $wgNamespaceProtection settings.

The following pages about the security model used by MediaWiki per default may be helpful to understand the instructions below:


 * Help:User rights
 * Manual:$wgGroupPermissions

WARNING: restricting read access not fully possible
MediaWiki is not designed to be a CMS, or to protect sensitive data. To the contrary, it was designed to be as open as possible. Thus it does not support full featured, air-tight protection of private content.

'''This extension can be used to apply read-restrictions to namespaces, limiting read access to specific groups. Note however that there may be several ways in which data protected that way may be "leaked" to the public''':


 * it is possible to include protected pages as templates, making them readable. This is addressed by the $wgNonincludableNamespaces setting introduced in MW 1.10, 19934.


 * it is possible to export pages without having read-access to them using Special:Export. This has been fixed in MW 1.10, 19935.


 * Content of newly created pages, and changes to existing pages, are shown in the RSS/Atom feeds provided by Special:Recentchanges, without checking read permission. This has been fixed in MW 1.10, 19944, as far as showing the entire newly created page and changes to existing pages. However, an excerpt of the beginning of the new page still shows in the feeds as of MW 1.10.1, 21343.


 * Read-Permission only applies to page content. "Hidden" pages are still listed in categories, Special:Allpages, etc. Also, changes to "hidden"  pages are still shown Special:Recentchanges, etc, including the edit summary.


 * Excerpts of page content may be shown by Special:Search, regardless of read permission. See 8825, addressed in 21821.

There are probably more "holes" in the read protection system. So, denying read access should be seen as a "nothing to see here, move along", rather than a guarantee of secrecy. For more information see security issues with authorization extensions.

Installing
Copy the Lockdown directory into the extensions folder of your MediaWiki installation. Then add the following lines to your LocalSettings.php file (near the end): The settings for $wgSpecialPageLockdown and $wgNamespacePermissionLockdown are just examples - see below for details.

Configuration
Note that the Lockdown extension can only be used to *restrict* access, not to *grant* it. If access is denied by some built-in setting of MediaWiki, it cannot be allowed using the Lockdown extension.

$wgSpecialPageLockdown
$wgSpecialPageLockdown allows you to specify for each special page which user groups have access to it. For example, to limit the use of Special:Export to logged in users, use this in LocalSettings.php:

Note that some special pages "natively" require a specific permission. For example, Special:Userrights, which can be used to assign user groups, required the "userrights" permission (granted only to the "bureaucrat" group per default). This restriction can not be overridden using the Lockdown extension.

$wgNamespacePermissionLockdown
$wgNamespacePermissionLockdown lets you restrict which user groups have which permissions on which namespace. For example, to grant only members of the sysop group write access to the project namespace, use this:

Wildcards for either the namespace or the permission (but not both at once) are supported. More specific definitions take precedence: The first two lines restrict all permissions in the project namespace to members of the sysop group, but still allow reading to anyone. The third line limits page moves in all namespaces to members of the autoconfirmed group.

Note that this way, you cannot *grant* permissions that have not been allowed by the build-in $wgGroupPermissions setting. The following does *not* allow regular users to patrol edits in the main namespace:

Instead, you would have to grant this right in $wgGroupPermissions first, and then restrict it again using $wgNamespacePermissionLockdown: Note that when restricting read-access to a namespace, the restriction can easily be circumvented if the user has write access to any other namespace: by including a read-protected page as a template, it can be made visible. To avoid this, you would have to forbid the use of pages from that namespace as templates, by adding the namespace's ID to $wgNonincludableNamespaces (this feature was introduced in MediaWiki 1.10, revision 19934):

PLEASE READ THE SECTION WARNING: restricting read access not fully possible FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE LIMITATIONS OF RESTRICTING READ ACCESS!