> 4. As I think about how users initialize a TraversalSource, I can't help 
> thinking that implementing this feature as a TraversalStrategy places it at 
> the wrong level of abstraction.

Currently, authentication is done on the connection level, but that gets much 
more difficult if it should be done on a per-element (vertex, edge, maybe even 
vertex property) basis. It should be relatively straightforward to implement 
this as a TraversalStrategy as it would only need to insert has(userId, 
currentUserId) steps for all traversed elements (+ equivalent property steps 
for all modifications). Do you have a different approach in mind that can work 
on a higher level of abstraction?
If it's implemented as a TraversalStrategy, then it needs to be ensured that 
the strategy is applied to all traversals and that the correct userId is used 
(so the one that the user has provided valid credentials for).

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Stephen Mallette <[email protected]> 
Gesendet: Freitag, 3. Januar 2020 12:44
An: [email protected]
Betreff: Re: Access controls for vertices, edges and vertex properties

Thanks for posting your idea. As others on the list may not have seen my post 
elsewhere, I'll just quickly repeat an approximation of what I wrote.
Basically, I think that users would like a feature like this, but I wondered if 
it were something best left to graph providers to implement native to their 
systems as an unoptimized implementation may not perform well or behave with 
limited functionality. So, with that in mind, here's some further 
thoughts/questions:

1. Could you say some more about how the "access control property" is defined? 
How would you envision such a thing to be generalized across all graphs 
providers?
2. Could you share some sample code for how you define your "custom predicate" 
and what the TraversalStrategy does with that (basically, please show how all 
that wraps up with Gremlin)?
3. Please keep in mind that any solution here must be portable across all 
programming languages - will users be able to define the required objects in 
python, javascript, etc?
4. As I think about how users initialize a TraversalSource, I can't help 
thinking that implementing this feature as a TraversalStrategy places it at the 
wrong level of abstraction. The notion of a "user" who has access rights is 
bound to the RemoteConnection (Cluster/Client). It is through that method that 
the graph is aware of who the user is and from that initial authenticating 
handshake can govern the data that the user sees.
While that thinking applies to remote graphs, it might also apply to embedded 
graphs as well where the "user" is supplied by way of the Configuration object 
given to the Graph instance where subsequent TraversalSource constructs would 
inherit from that.





On Thu, Jan 2, 2020 at 6:55 AM Mike Lee <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello
>
> Apologies if this is the incorrect forum - I was pointed here from 
> another mailing list.
>
> I had an idea for an access control scheme that could be applied to 
> vertices, edges or vertex properties and would allow a server to check 
> whether a user has permission to retrieve or traverse that particular 
> graph element. The access control property would be a set of rules 
> outlining the attributes, and the combination of those attributes, 
> that establish whether or not a user has sufficient privileges for 
> that graph element. I have experimented with attempting to use the 
> existing Gremlin language to do this, but I have so far been unable to 
> achieve the level of fine-grained access control that I believe would 
> be useful in a variety of situations. I have tested this with a 
> prototype that uses a Java object and a custom predicate that tests a 
> user's profile against the access control, and then used a traversal 
> strategy to constrain a query to those elements which pass the test.
>
> I was curious as to whether people would see such a feature as 
> something that could be part of Gremlin, or whether it would be better 
> left to specific implementations of Tinkerpop.
>
> Thanks for your consideration.
>

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