6 ms·

So much for information compartmentalization. Does the typical engineer need access to payment details for their daily work?

deleted 5y ago
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ABeeSea 5y ago
Part of the appeal is working at a place like Amazon is having a voice in decision making in the product you’re building. Hard to make informed decisions or opinions without the data. Engineers in Amazon retail definitely have broad access to sales data.
oconnor663 5y ago
The tradeoffs for any individual piece of data are different from the tradeoffs of a company-wide policy. Siloing off one little thing (e.g. credit card info) usually doesn't inconvenience very many people, but at the same time it only provides marginal security. No front page headline has ever read "At Least The Credit Card Info Was Safe". On the other hand, a company-wide policy of siloing everything can have more of a security impact, but it also inconveniences everyone frequently. That's the tradeoff that many tech companies don't want to make.
- zerkten 5y ago
  I don't see how this precludes just-in-time access. Even if people can re-up on their own, you can still observe the data access patterns and manage the risk. Further, when you see someone is getting blocked a lot you can improve the experience for them so they are unblocked, or have more efficient access to the data. This is just mature data and security management. Quality of life and developer experience are important topics in many ways, but should they really trump security consistently? It's always going to be dependent on people's risk assessment and comfort, but frequently it skews the wrong way because the people making the decisions know that they'll be gone.
  - myohmy 5y ago
    Implementing just-in-time access on legacy systems that pre-date just-in-time architectures is extremely expensive. Its cheaper to either give all info or no info. Which is what every legacy company does instead. My company can shut off my access to the all the databases when they stop asking me to troubleshoot any and all data issues. Which will never happen.
nonameiguess 5y ago
No, but doing least privilege, separation of privileges, and RBAC correctly is tedious and difficult and slows development velocity, so companies rarely do it well if they even bother trying unless some outside force compels them. I highly doubt it would be possible to do something like this at AWS, just because hosting multitenant infrastructure and working with the government forces you to implement security since you're being audited and awarded contracts on that basis. Twitch users don't give a crap about the security of the platform. They just want to monetize as quickly as they can, too. So I'm not hugely surprised that practices and culture would be different even if they have the same parent company, especially since Twitch was an acquisition. Even if not, though, I'd expect security at Prime to be better than Twitch but worse than Marketplace, Marketplace to be worse than AWS, etc. All speculation since I've never worked at any Amazon product, but that's what I would expect.

deleted 5y ago

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ABeeSea 5y ago

Part of the appeal is working at a place like Amazon is having a voice in decision making in the product you’re building. Hard to make informed decisions or opinions without the data. Engineers in Amazon retail definitely have broad access to sales data.

oconnor663 5y ago

The tradeoffs for any individual piece of data are different from the tradeoffs of a company-wide policy. Siloing off one little thing (e.g. credit card info) usually doesn't inconvenience very many people, but at the same time it only provides marginal security. No front page headline has ever read "At Least The Credit Card Info Was Safe". On the other hand, a company-wide policy of siloing everything can have more of a security impact, but it also inconveniences everyone frequently. That's the tradeoff that many tech companies don't want to make.

zerkten 5y ago
I don't see how this precludes just-in-time access. Even if people can re-up on their own, you can still observe the data access patterns and manage the risk. Further, when you see someone is getting blocked a lot you can improve the experience for them so they are unblocked, or have more efficient access to the data. This is just mature data and security management. Quality of life and developer experience are important topics in many ways, but should they really trump security consistently? It's always going to be dependent on people's risk assessment and comfort, but frequently it skews the wrong way because the people making the decisions know that they'll be gone.
- myohmy 5y ago
  Implementing just-in-time access on legacy systems that pre-date just-in-time architectures is extremely expensive. Its cheaper to either give all info or no info. Which is what every legacy company does instead. My company can shut off my access to the all the databases when they stop asking me to troubleshoot any and all data issues. Which will never happen.

nonameiguess 5y ago

No, but doing least privilege, separation of privileges, and RBAC correctly is tedious and difficult and slows development velocity, so companies rarely do it well if they even bother trying unless some outside force compels them. I highly doubt it would be possible to do something like this at AWS, just because hosting multitenant infrastructure and working with the government forces you to implement security since you're being audited and awarded contracts on that basis. Twitch users don't give a crap about the security of the platform. They just want to monetize as quickly as they can, too. So I'm not hugely surprised that practices and culture would be different even if they have the same parent company, especially since Twitch was an acquisition. Even if not, though, I'd expect security at Prime to be better than Twitch but worse than Marketplace, Marketplace to be worse than AWS, etc. All speculation since I've never worked at any Amazon product, but that's what I would expect.