I'm not here to define a perfect infrastructure for securing NoSQL
databases and Riak and go into implementation details... It's not my
intention because I simply don't have time to dedicate to this big
project and it's impossible to come up with a perfect solution right
away. Either way asking customers to be security experts is asking for
trouble... And I base this statement on the actual real world
experience in security, which I have quite a bit. I'll leave it on
this note :-) And let's talk in 10 or 15 years :-)

A quick advice to the Riak team... If you want to go beyond startups
as your customers you'll need to have a good story around security and
an integrated solution people can use. Good luck!

On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 2:23 PM, Aphyr <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 09/30/2011 01:28 PM, Kyle Quest wrote:
>>
>> Having separate nodes for reads and writes provides an opportunity for
>> better isolation and control even when the requests are forwarded to
>> different vnodes...
>
> I humbly suggest this is a bad idea. Varying behavior between nodes
>
>  a.) is a headache to configure and maintain
>  b.) creates fault-tolerance problems
>  c.) creates unbalanced loads
>
> It's at odds with the symmetric layout of a dynamo system. Best case, you'll
> fail more often. In addition, splitting reads and writes will require you to
> work harder to handle client IDs. If you aren't careful, you'll lose data.
>
>> Just like with anything else you can always build something on top...
>> The difference in maturity is determined by what you have to build
>> yourself vs what's already available and integrated into a unified
>> solution. Yes, there are different and unique aspects to how NoSQL
>> databases operate, but it's no excuse for not having any integrated
>> security. It's going to take time for integrated solutions to emerge,
>> but this is exactly what I was saying about the maturity stage the
>> NoSQL databases are in.
>
> What was the last datastore you *didn't* have to wrap in your own security
> layer? I've built... I dunno, twenty or thirty of them for various
> applications. Because trust is complicated, sufficiently general security
> systems require almost as much configuration and integration glue as the
> code you'd write to do it from existing primitives.
>
> That said, if you have a proposal for a security model I'd like to see it.
> There is a dearth of pluggable access control layers for datastores. I
> suspect there's a good reason for that.
>
>> Either way saying, "you customer go take care of our database
>> product security" is not the answer :-)
>
> It is an entirely reasonable answer; access control is almost totally
> orthogonal to robust data storage. You're asking Ikea to control who puts
> things in your cabinets.
>
> I'm guessing the reason your posts appear so confused is because you don't
> have a clear idea about what properties a "database security" system would
> have. It might be worth writing down your specific requirements, and asking
> "What percentage of use cases will this satisfy efficiently?"
>
> --Kyle Kingsbury
>

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