The way I'd answer the question is that if you need authorization to be enforced by the underlying data store, then the data store must have the capability of inbound impersonation. Over time, many storage systems have added that function. There was a time in the not too distant past when many relational databases didn't support inbound impersonation.
The challenge is that what I'd call "simple file systems" don't usually support impersonation. The closest work that I'm aware of was a project by IBM long ago on AIX to support identity on a per thread, rather than per process basis and the file system honored that. As Ted pointed out previously with the coarse grained process level security model typical of unix file systems, you have to create another process which has performance and complexity implications. Not unsolvable of course. If someone uses a storage system that lacks the needed inbound impersonation/identity projection then another solution must be found. As Ted points out one option is perimeter security. Another solution is a product that does authorization at a higher level. To a degree Drill views can do this. Some other products may have more complex authorization in the higher level engine and not rely on the datastore. I'm not a fan of that because it makes bypass a little too easy for my taste, but life is full of complex tradeoffs. Keys _______________________________ Keys Botzum Senior Principal Technologist kbot...@maprtech.com <mailto:kbot...@maprtech.com> 443-718-0098 MapR Technologies http://www.mapr.com <http://www.mapr.com/> > On Jul 1, 2016, at 3:48 PM, Ted Dunning <ted.dunn...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 11:50 AM, Paul Rogers <prog...@maprtech.com> wrote: > >> All of this is a long-winded way of asking this: What do other “big data” >> tools do to solve this problem? If one is doing big data, should a >> distributed file system be a requirement if one wants security? >> > > Other big data tools use perimeter security. That is a fundamentally > troubling approach. Good to do, but hardly sufficient.
