Hi Eric,

Unfortunately, SKIP_CREDENTIAL_SUBCOPING_INDIRECTION=true does not work for
non-AWS S3 storage because that setting effectively causes "endpoint"
settings to be ignored.

I'll look into other options for now.

Cheers,
Dmitri.

On Thu, Jul 31, 2025 at 3:21 PM Eric Maynard <eric.w.mayn...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> The existence of SKIP_CREDENTIAL_SUBCOPING_INDIRECTION may be helpful
> context for this thread. With that config set, we already support loading
> tables without subscoped vended credentials. If there are certain
> storage configurations that only work with this config set, that doesn't
> seem like it would affect our security posture.
> --EM
>
> On Fri, Aug 1, 2025 at 12:36 AM Robert Stupp <sn...@snazy.de> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > not sure whether exposing the object storage credentials given to
> > Polaris to all clients isn't going to cause a "false impression of
> > security" (aka: "our credentials are vended by Polaris, so we're safe"
> > - nope...).
> > With my "evil user" hat on, I'd try to figure out the configuration
> > option (is it realm-specific?) to tell Polaris to yield its "master"
> > object storage credentials for a few seconds, just long enough so I
> > can gain access to it and have access to all the data.
> >
> > No doubt, there are S3 implementations (software and appliances) that
> > do not support STS, which is admittedly not great. I can imagine that
> > at least some appliance vendors and software projects/products will
> > get STS.
> >
> > For the non-STS use cases, I think S3 signing is the way to go. Sure,
> > it requires one more request, but we can make those requests fast (aka
> > not require any persistence access) as we did in Nessie. With that we
> > could still ensure that clients don't have access to everything,
> > respecting the object-storage level read/write/list privileges.
> >
> > Another option is still to configure the object storage credentials at
> > the clients. It's not great, but it's still an option. Admins can give
> > each client individual credentials to reduce potential risks, being
> > able to revoke access for individual clients, and/or audit those.
> >
> > On Thu, Jul 31, 2025 at 2:51 AM Yufei Gu <flyrain...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Thanks for raising this, Dmitri!
> > >
> > > For non-STS use cases, some users may be more comfortable without
> > > credential vending. They could configure the storage credentials at the
> > > engines side. Can we first confirm that vending raw credentials are
> > really
> > > users asking for?
> > >
> > > If that's the case, raw credential vending should be at least optional,
> > > which could be guarded by feature flags.
> > >
> > > And I didn't see much difference between option 1 and option 2. Both
> > > provide raw credentials and need rotation. Either way is fine with me.
> > >
> > > Yufei
> > >
> > >
> > > On Wed, Jul 30, 2025 at 3:24 PM Dmitri Bourlatchkov <di...@apache.org>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Hi All,
> > > >
> > > > Recent conversations [1] [2] about non-AWS S3 storage brought up user
> > needs
> > > > for operating with S3-compatible storage that does not have STS.
> > > >
> > > > Remote request signing can be used to support those use cases, but it
> > is a
> > > > considerable development effort to add to Polaris, plus it has
> > different
> > > > performance characteristics than vended credentials.
> > > >
> > > > I propose two short-term options to support users of non-STS S3
> > storage.
> > > >
> > > > 1) Add a configuration option to vend the same credentials that
> > Polaris has
> > > > to clients.
> > > >
> > > > While this may (rightly) be considered suboptimal from the security
> > > > perspective, this option does give users a choice to operate clients
> > > > without explicitly configuring storage credentials for them. Polaris
> > > > Servers still control the rotation of those credentials.
> > > >
> > > > 2) Add secondary plain credentials for vending to clients. Polaris
> > itself
> > > > will use one key/secret pair. Clients will be issued another
> key/secret
> > > > pair. Rotation of the client credentials should be possible to
> > implement
> > > > too.
> > > >
> > > > WDYT?
> > > >
> > > > [1]
> > https://github.com/apache/polaris/issues/1530#issuecomment-3137374380
> > > > [2] https://github.com/apache/polaris/issues/2207
> > > >
> > > > Thanks,
> > > > Dmitri.
> > > >
> >
>

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