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Status Delivered
Workspace Knowledge Catalog
Created by Guest
Created on Oct 11, 2018

Rely on Cloud IAM to control individualized access to IBM Cloud assets

The Cloud Platform has made a significant investment in IAM enablement over the past year as part of the One Cloud work. I think we could do a better job of leveraging this system in Catalog to help users create a secure, well-governed data lake.

For example, as it stands today Connections in the Catalog include an API key that is intended to grant access to a particular asset. This API key is tied to a User ID (often the User who created the asset) or a Service ID. A user of the Catalog who interacts with an Asset from that Connection has her own User ID, but that detail is lost because the Connection’s identity overrides it.

An alternative would be to rely on the Connection to describe where to find the Asset, but require the user of the Catalog to possess sufficient IAM privileges to work with the Asset directly. In the interactive case it should be possible to rely on the authenticated user's token (see e.g. Cloud SQL Query for a working example), while in the case of a scripted or background task the user could supply her own API key for the job.

  • Admin
    Michal Szylar
    Reply
    |
    Mar 21, 2023

    Hi seems, it is already supported: https://dataplatform.cloud.ibm.com/docs/content/wsj/getting-started/set-up-wkc.html

    If not please open a new idea.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Dec 14, 2018

    Hi Dejan, thanks for the comment.

    The big gap I see is a lack of auditability. Think about the kinds of questions the regulators ask for SOC / ISO / HIPAA. My understanding is that they take a rather dim view of the use of shared credentials, as it neuters the audit trail, increases the likelihood of a credential being compromised, and complicates rotation procedures in the event of a compromise.

    The way I see it the Connection is exactly this kind of shared credential. Yes, it is protected by the ACL on the project or catalog, but there's nothing that prevents the credential from being used outside of the context of that container, either by members of the project or by someone else with whom they share the credential out-of-band. IAM is the final arbiter (at least for COS) of whether data can be accessed / modified / deleted, and from IAM's point of view all of the access via a given API key ties back to a single ID.

    I know WDP balked at this integration last year because of the overhead of introducing lots and lots of information into IAM but I would think that newer enhancements like Access Groups would help in that regard. An Access Group that contains the members of a container seems like a sensible thing to me.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Dec 14, 2018

    The problem I see with this proposal is that it completely bypasses the 'container ACL' - a connection in a project or a catalog is first and foremost governed by the ACL of that container. Saying that IAM should be used to control access to it effectively makes project/catalog concept moot.

     

    We had discussions about IAM supporting container-based policies instead of resource-based ones, but it always ends up with the realization that we need to tell IAM how to handle project/catalog members, and then it does it. This is super-redundant - we tell IAM to do something we know, then it does it on our behalf - why bother? The only value is by allowing admin to 'override' project/catalog membership and inject super-user policies ("yes, I know you are member of the project and should have access to its resources, but for some reason I am banning you specifically").

     

    Let me know if I misunderstood the proposal, which is entirely possible :-).