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Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System

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Re: Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System

#131

Post by fierro »

anonygler wrote: post #71
colesantiago wrote: post #6

I love reading about Google's systems, but I wish I could work on those problems at scale, that is my dream really. I wonder what more systems Google has that we don't know about. I know Borg has become what we know as k8s but surely there must be more things that Google has made internally that are not open source. Curious about this and would like to know more about it from anyone in the trenches at Google.

The most impressive part about Google is how its emphasis on internal standards has allowed it to build some really impressive stuff. Eg, You can do a sql join on any dataset, in any datacenter. You can turn any query into a hosted visualization. Every test invocation is streamed to a central server and results can be shared with a url. There’s more, but those are my two favorites.

yeah the TAP/Forge testing infra is pretty gnarly

Re: Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System

#135

Post by BitPolice »

zeeed wrote: post #129
Dowwie wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace "digital object" with "a PDF of your checking account transactions for 2018". You want to control who can do what with that PDF. Your privacy is at stake.

Sure, that’s privacy in the sense of “no one can access my stuff, unauthorized”. I struggled with the sentence cause, at the same time, creating one global centralized authentication source creates the opposite of privacy in the sense of anonymity. Certainly OT wrt the actual content of the work...

I may be misunderstanding the issue you're pointing out here... but I note that while the paper/sentence talks about "authorization" you're talking about centralized "authentication."

As an authorization system Zanzibar focuses on: can agent A (identified through some means) perform action X on object Y. It isn't about deciding whether an arbitrary actor is agent A but proscribing what actions agent A can perform against the universe of all possible objects (which likewise are referenced abstractly and not stored within the system itself).

The knowledge that A could do X on Y is information that might be disclosed (and thus entails some privacy risk)... but inherently doesn't reveal: anything about the identity of A; whether A has ever done X; or what Y's contents are or what it represents.

On the other hand, perhaps you mean that because membership in sets of users is also stored within it (via a sort of "is member of" permission) you can use that to de-anonymize who a given actor is. This might work but it assumes you can uniquely derive which agent from a set of abstract agents represents that individual and that you extrinsically something about the person being the only person in this specific set of sets.

Re: Zanzibar: Consistent, Global Authorization System

#137

Post by sb8244 »

ruomingpang wrote: post #136
sb8244 wrote: post #126

How would you deal with questions like "provide all content accessible to a user" in a system like this? Would you watch and replicate to your own database?

You will need an ACL-aware index, which is one of the main use cases of Zanzibar.

Do you get the ACL from Zanzibar to your data store using a watch?

I'm just confirming that replication is the best strategy and there's not some magic that I'm not aware of

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