Hey folks I opened a PR at https://github.com/apache/polaris/pull/395 to support disabling credential vending for external catalogs.
Currently, some remote catalogs don't control the table location for Iceberg tables, allowing people to create tables in overlapping directories in storage. A person that has storage credentials to one table necessarily has access to all of the tables that overlap. This is already an issue for Iceberg users. However, with Polaris, some users expect that table-level RBAC and credential vending will somehow magically resolve their security issues so that they can tightly control access despite overlapping table locations. This is obviously a misconception. But in the spirit of making things secure by default, I am adding a configuration flag to disable credential vending for external catalogs. As with the current configuration to disable overlapping table locations, there is a catalog-level override so that catalog admins can enable credential vending on a case-by-case basis if they feel the risk is tolerable. Changing the configuration to disable credential vending by default is a breaking change, so I'd like to see what everyone thinks about making that change. Currently, the PR does _not_ change the default value, so we can merge it as is, without any impact on existing users. But unless users really dig into the code or the documentation, they may not understand the implications well enough to make the more secure configuration setting. WDYT? Mike
