I'd like to use Amazon SimpleDB to store data for my iPhone app. Different users will own items within the same domain. I'd like for users to be able to delete their own items but not each others', and for this restriction to be enforced server-side.
I am hoping to use anonymous TVM.
What is the best way to do this?
Using IAM User Management you can create a custom policy for each user or group to allow or deny access to delete items in SimpleDB. If each user has their own domain you can restrict access to the domain by using the arn format arn:aws:sdb:<region>:<account_ID>:domain/<domain_name>
I think that you can't use IAM - you seem to say that you have one domain where all user data is stored.
One way to achieve what you want is to use item name prefixes that are user based, e.g. user jimsmith would have all items stored under an item name that beings with 'jimsmith' or some random string, unique to jimsmith (which could be stored somewhere).
Then you are in charge of security, so you would not be able to have the phones directly query AWS - they would need to talk to your intermediary server which would handle security. You have to assume that people could run the app on a jailbroken phone, and decompile, etc.
You can use IAM to restrict a single user to a small portion of an S3 bucket though. You could then index the bucket using a server app of your design. Then the DB could be used for searching purposes with your own code, so that iPhones only deal with S3.
From what I have researched the simpleDB user right policies aren't designed to be used in such a way you are proposing (meaning undisclosed number of users of the app) and the way to handle this might be to use some server application in-the-middle as was suggested here: Mobile app and SimpleDB direct 'Access Policy'
Related
I am developing an app on unity3d and using firebase realtime database for user info and stats. The users need to authorize (via google) to read/write data to database inside the app. Since, users do not know the database address, which is embedded inside the app, do I still have security problem? If yes, what should I do? I do not want any user to change their own stats :)
Yes you still might have a security problem. Security by obscurity is not true security. It is still possible for people to snoop network traffic away from your app to get the address of the database. The firebase way of solving this is via Database Rules configured in the console/CLI. Making it so users cannot change their own stats will depend on how your app is structured and who IS allowed to change them. In any case, this can be expressed in Rules as well.
Just you have accessibility to database and its rules. Users just can read and write and change their data and they can't change another one's data.
I have an iOS App. Would like to explore what is needed to be done to achieve the following:
1) The user taps on the map
2) US Census Tract info is requested from database
3) Later the user wants to purchase this tract info.
The US Census Tract info would be uploaded to Cloud Object Storage.
There are 70,000 Tracts grouped by US States = 50 + 1 (DC)
I could use SQL Query to select one Census Tract by its ID.
In the iOS App I can use Apple Login and get users' name and email.
The question is how to grant/revoke access to this info automatically
after in-app purchase?
The question is two-fold. Do I have to create 70,000 CSV files and grant them an access to? Or this can be achieved dynamically with SQL?
The second part is - how to automate this process?
Does IBM Cloud has this capability?
I would expect that you would use a single Service ID that would have access to the data sitting in COS, and that a user's access to the underlying data would be handled in your application logic. The Cloud IAM access policies are not intended for end-users as much as for internal development/operations teams to manage access to various cloud resources.
Depending on the format of the census data, SQL Query could be a great way to do it. You could use SQL query to create a new object with the subset of data the user has requested, and then create a presigned URL that will expire in a whatever timeframe is reasonable, allowing the file to be downloaded to the client device.
Is it possible for an App running on multiple devices to have their own individual Firestore database, which the user of the device can access with their own login?
No. You would typically have each user access their own collection or subcollection within the database, identified by their Firebase Authentication user id, then protect that collection with security rules.
No. You would make a database with a child for every user to keep all his data. This structure is pretty common In apps. You could also add the security features that only a user can access his own data to make sure it’s individual
I want to create an app with IONIC to manage buildings. A user can hold multiple buildings. Each building has rooms. Each rooms has logs. Each user is a member of a cooperation.
For many years I've used LAMP. Now moving to mobile and made some IONIC apps. With 2 apps I've used sqlLite as datastore on the mobile device.
But now I've read up on couchDB and pouchDB and really like the concept and the sync option. So now I'm looking into this to use as my datastore (on the mobile and also on the backend).
Now I've got 2 major questions/concerns:
1) Authentication
In my LAMP situation, I usually have an SESSION (table which holds the sessions strings and userID) and an USERS table.
When the user logs in, the user is lookup in the USERS table, and a session string is created and saved with the userID.
Now each time a request is made to the server (for example update data), the session string is also supplied and matched to the SESSION table and retrieve the correct user. From that point on, I can validate if the post is valid and the data also belongs to the correct user.
Back to couchDB, I know there is a cookie management in couchDB (http://guide.couchdb.org/editions/1/en/security.html).
So here I can validate if an user exists and validate the credentials. Now the app can send requests with a cookie.
2) Fetch/Update the right data
In my LAMP situation, I always knew which data belongs to which user. And the back end always checks if this is correct.
In my couchDB I want to create database and each document is an user with all the data.
So now here comes the problem. I can validate an user in couchDB, put there's no way to validate the data (at least as far I know of) that it belongs to the right user.
My goal is that the mobile device syncs the document to the couchDB server.
3) Database structure
At first I wanted to create a database per user. But this is not scalable. Also an user is an member of a cooperation. I also need to generate reports per cooperation/user.
So now I was thinking to create a database per cooperation. But now the problem is, when a user login, I need to know wich database to connect to lookup the user data.
Now I want to use 1 database and each document is an user and holds al data (buildings/logs).
Has anybody got some other suggestions/resources on this approach?
You can try couchdb in combination with superlogin:
SuperLogin is a full-featured NodeJS/Express user authentication solution for APIs and Single Page Apps (SPA) using CouchDB or Cloudant.
github
Tutorial
I am storing images of one user(owner) in google cloud storage bucket. I wanted to grant read permission for this image to a group of users(contacts of owner).I am planning to use Access Control List for this purpose; e.g., Owner will have full permission to his bucket and the contacts will have read permission on the images. There are chances that owner will have a very huge number of contacts, say 1 million.
So,
will there be any performance issue, if ACL contains a huge number of users?
Will this be the right approach for access control? Or should I consider signed URL?
Regards,Remya
This approach is not going to work for you. There are some significant limitations and downsides to trying to serve content like this. First and foremost, there is a limit of 100 ACL entries on a given object. You could get around this by granting permission to a group for which every user was a member, but even so, it still means that viewing the images will require that every user be logged in to their Google account in addition to however they authenticate for your site.
The canonical way to accomplish this would be to keep all images private and owned by your site's own account. When a user loads a page, verify however you like that they have appropriate authorization to view the images, and if so, generate signed URLs for the images. This allows you to use any authorization scheme without limitation while serving images directly from GCS.