On Wed, Aug 6, 2014 at 4:29 PM, Matt Silverlock <[email protected]> wrote:
> Thanks for the reply Daniel.
>
> Good point RE: the GetLocation permission - ran into a similar issue with an
> IAM user for duplicity before. Will fix that.
>
> It looks like the best solution is then for the IAM user that WAL-E uses on
> the server to have only Get/List/Put permissions and to remove all "delete"
> permissions from this user. Deletion of older backups should then be managed
> by a separate IAM user (on a different machine - i.e. my Mac) that has
> delete permissions, and/or by using some generous/safe lifecycle rules to
> delete things automatically (i.e. > 90 days old).

That seems reasonable.  It's what I do, at least.  It gives you a lot
more agility in tweaking retention rules and analyzing the output for
many databases.

> To understand correctly: if the server doing the backups is compromised, it
> can't delete any older backups. My only concern is that it [the compromised
> server running WAL-E] could still overwrite both WAL backups and full
> backups (by issuing a PUT with a key matching an existing object?). Can a
> PUT where a key already exists overwrite the existing data?

Yeah, unfortunately a hopefully-idempotent PUT is rather useful to
deal with the problem of lost responses for successfully processed
PUTs from S3 in event of a network blip.  And, I don't think S3 has a
no-overwrite permission level.

There are ways around such a catastrophic scenario like the S3
versioning feature, but then WAL-E would have to learn how to address
versions for replay and have deletion semantics (or you'd have to
write some side-bar software to massage the version of things and
produce a prefix for WAL-E to use).

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