Administrative Policy management
Administrative Policies play a crucial role in determining who has authorization to make changes within a system. By distributing control and avoiding a single point of administration, these policies enhance security and management.
Administrative Policy management sets the importance and approval process associated with an administrative activity, such as adding a new user, changing transaction workflows and editing addresses.
When multiple administrative actions are performed together and sent for approval, the system applies the Approval workflow associated with the highest placed Action. This should be the most restrictive and secure workflow associated with these actions. Therefore, the hierarchy should match the importance of the associated workflows. You should not associate a low level workflow with a high importance Action.
Actions should be grouped according to the level of Approval workflows. Within the group of Actions you should set the order according to your organisations needs. If you do not follow this ordering you might end up with a low level Approval workflow (e.g. that only requires one approver) set to your most important Action (e.g. Reconnect mobile devices)
Ensure that all Approval workflows that you need are already defined before ordering the Action heirarchy. The order of actions can be adjusted dynamically to adapt to evolving approval processes.
Assign the Approval workflow for each Action category. Then set the order of ‘Action’ categories from most important to least by assigning a Heirarchy number to each one.
The Administrative Policies Table
The Administrative Policies table is accessible by selecting the middle tab in the Policy Management screen. Within this context, two default workflows govern administrative changes:
- System default administrator workflow
- This workflow mandates two approvers for any administrative action.
- All approvers must be local approvers working on the cold vault machine.
- Notably, this policy is editable, allowing customization to suit specific requirements.
- System no approvers needed workflow
- Zero approvers are required.
- This workflow streamlines administrative processes where approvals are unnecessary.
Add additional workflows appropriate to the needs of your organisation. For more information, see Approval Workflow managementApproval Workflow management.
The Administrative Policies section provides essential information related to system management and control:
- Hierarchy:
- The hierarchy establishes the priority order for handling multiple requests submitted simultaneously.
- Priority numbers range from 1 (highest) to 11 (lowest).
- For instance, you set Assign or remove a user's admin role to a higher position (i.e. Hierarchy 1) than Add or edit accounts (i.e. Hierarchy 5). If you perform both these actions and request approval together, the system selects the approval workflow associated with Assign or remove a user's admin role.
- Actions:
- There are 12 Actions listed which must be arranged according to importance, the most important being placed at the top of the heirarchy (Number 1).
The actions are described here:
- Create, change, or disable users: Pertains to modifications made to user accounts.
- Add or edit addresses and address groups: Involves managing contact addresses (including deletions) and address groups.
- Add or edit accounts: Deals with adding or modifying existing accounts.
- Add or remove admin users or admin permissions from any role: Refers to changes related to admin users (including adding or deleting admin users).
- Change system preferences: Refers to adjustments in MPC system preferences.
- Change transaction policies and approval workflows: Includes editing existing approval workflows and transaction policies or adding new ones.
- Change administrative policies and approval workflows: Includes editing existing approval workflows and administrative policies or adding new ones.
- Create or update smart contracts: Make changes to new or existing smart contract configurations.
- Backup setting or restore from cold vault from backup: Covers backup and restore operations for the cold vault.
- Edit ‘Coin management’ or Add EVMs and tokens: Relates to managing native coins, EVMs, ERC-20 and TRC-20 tokens via the Coin Management screen.
Note: In the Impenetrable Vault there are 12 actions, but in the Desktop/uMPC app only 10 of these are available.
- Approval workflow: The approval workflow which is assigned to the administrative task.
- Last Updated: The date and time the item was most recently updated.
Setting Administrative Policies
When handling the necessary administrative tasks outlined under the Action category, follow these steps:
Select an Approval workflow field from the drop down list to assign it to the specific Action task.
To adjust the priority order, edit the Hierarchy field by specifying the desired priority number.
The lines will automatically re-order based on the updated hierarchy.
Click Save changes. This action triggers an approval session for the change (which, in itself, is an administrative change).
The session follows the settings in place before the modification.