Flask Web Framework Extension for Dynamic Role Based Access Control

Due to the constantly growing architectural complexity of modern web services and software projects, a need has arisen to create more flexible and extensible development tools and libraries that would allow for cleaner and more scalable code. One of the most popular web frameworks, Flask, written in Python, has been developed with possibility of creation of third-party extensions for various tasks in mind. The purpose of this work is to implement a full-fledged role-based access control method using the mechanism of Flask extensions and a domain model which is fully conformant to the appropriate standards. Existing solutions, as well as their key drawbacks, are taken into account in this work, and an access control algorithm is suggested that uses a connection to the internal database of the project in which the extension is embedded, as compared to the existing practices of hard-coding access control rules into the codebase of the project. This paper contains 55 pages, 14 pictures, 5 tables, 8 source code extracts, 31 references, 2 appendices. Keywords: RBAC, Flask, Python, library, API