This article outlines a practical suggestion in the case of publishing updated content permissions from a staging environment to a remote live environment. Following this suggestion will ensure that the updated permissions are indeed published to live.
Resolution
Due to the nature of how remote live staging detects changes in content for publishing to live, content must be “touched” (an update must be saved on that content) for the content to be flagged and pushed to live upon publication.
When changing permissions for a web content in remote live staging, make sure to “touch” the piece of content to flag it as “modified”. This will ensure that a re-publish occurs on the newly permissioned content.
Please note that this only applies to remote live staging; local live staging does not require the republishing of content to enact permissions change.
This discrepancy has been resolved in Liferay Portal 7.0.