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Why Google Zanzibar shines at building authorization

blog.warrant.dev

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Re: Why Google Zanzibar shines at building authorization

#12

Post by kkajla »

sails wrote: post #5

> A Flexible, Uniform Data Model for Authorization Are there good examples of similar applications of data modules for similarly niche use cases? I get that there are obviously endless data models, but this seems to extend beyond that into a more integrated concept and I don’t quite know why that seems to be the case.

I think GraphQL might be a good example. Some might not consider it to be very niche, but its intention is to consolidate dependent API queries such that the client can fetch all the data it needs in a single request. In both Zanzibar and GraphQL, the idea behind the schema/modeling language is to provide a layer where logic specific to relationships between data (in the case of GraphQL) or logic specific to authorization (in the case of Zanzibar) can be specified such that neither the server nor the client need to worry about it and can instead query for data in a simpler way.

Re: Why Google Zanzibar shines at building authorization

#17

Post by noah_buddy »

susscrofa wrote: post #11

The Zanzibar paper has a section on the consistency model, which says that the race conditions outlined are solved by respecting update order. It then solves it by using Spanner as underlying storage (which is kind of lazy). How does Warrant deal with consistency?

Why is it lazy? Seems like leveraging a tool Google built for distributed systems specifically for consistency guarantees.

Re: Why Google Zanzibar shines at building authorization

#18

Post by kkajla »

susscrofa wrote: post #11

The Zanzibar paper has a section on the consistency model, which says that the race conditions outlined are solved by respecting update order. It then solves it by using Spanner as underlying storage (which is kind of lazy). How does Warrant deal with consistency?

You've highlighted a very important part of the paper. A lot of the external consistency guarantees provided by Zanzibar are facilitated by Spanner and its TrueTime mechanism. Warrant doesn't currently support/use Spanner. However, for the databases we do support (MySQL and Postgres - which are both ACID compliant), we've implemented the zookie protocol using the incrementing transaction ids they provide. This approach works for single writer deployments of these databases, so know that write throughput and overall availability will be lower. We started with this approach because most teams still use MySQL/Postgres. Warrant is built to support running on different types of databases, so we will be working on support for Spanner and other multi-writer distributed databases like Cockroach and Yugabyte in the future. I hope that helps.

Re: Why Google Zanzibar shines at building authorization

#19

Post by hamburglar »

kkajla wrote: post #4
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #2

How does Zanzibar relate to capability-based schemes?

As I understand it, "capabilities" in capability-based schemes uniquely reference an object and specify a list of access rights on that object. This seems fairly similar to tuples in Zanzibar, which reference a unique object, an access right, and a unique subject whom the access right belongs to. You can think of Zanzibar as a layer used for defining, storing, and querying for capabilities.

Yeah, I believe capability/verb simply maps directly to relation in Zanzibar speak. “Can edit” vs “is an editor”. I’m more accustomed to the verb style, so whenever I read about authz systems that use relations or roles, I’m constantly mapping the concepts in my head to try to find examples where they aren't 1:1 and have yet to think of any.
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