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An increasing number of data saas companies store your database/warehouse credentials so they can connect directly, Ie: Postgres/snowflake host, port, user, pas

An increasing number of data saas companies store your database/warehouse credentials so they can connect directly, Ie: Postgres/snowflake host, port, user, password, etc. That information is long lived (unlike tokens which expire) and you need to use the real value (unlike the hash of a password). Are there resources/books which cover the (many) best practices to keep that information safe? Things like: separate database/microservice, separate vpc?, encrypt the database, filter those fields from logs, etc etc etc. Is a service like aws lambda actually more secure then using a paas (heroku/fly/render) vs ECS (where there might be slower turn around times to actually bump/patch CVEs than the aws lambda team would take?).

wernerb 4y ago
I'm not sure what you are asking. For any reasonable service/Saad this is by far not te norm for end user credentials. They are always hashed, hopefully salted and with a strong algorithm. Administrator credentials are harder yes. Something like hashicorp vault can be made to fit any company (custom backend plugins). For most stuff it already has backend plugins available (ssh, any rdbms). The open source version I have seen can fit a large fintech startup no problem.
- tomhallett 4y ago
  Sorry, I'm not referring to "end user credentials" which can be salted and hashed. I'm referring to user data which has to be stored in the database. For example, let's talk about the BI tool, mode.com. As a customer, I login to mode.com and click the "New Database Connection" button, where I get a screen to input the connection information for my postgres database: host, username, password, port, etc. If you are a developer at mode.com, what are the best practices to keeping `user_database_connections.password` secure? I can't hash the `password` column because I need to use the raw `password` when my code connects to the user's postgres database. I'm assuming I should encrypt the information, so an attacker who does a databse dump can't read the `user_database_connections` table, but what else should I do? Keep that information in a seperate database? seperate microservice? etc, etc. Other examples of tools which connect directly to the database(s) of the customer, so they store db creds of their customers in the saas database: - hightouch.com - fivetran.com - explo.com

wernerb 4y ago

I'm not sure what you are asking. For any reasonable service/Saad this is by far not te norm for end user credentials. They are always hashed, hopefully salted and with a strong algorithm. Administrator credentials are harder yes. Something like hashicorp vault can be made to fit any company (custom backend plugins). For most stuff it already has backend plugins available (ssh, any rdbms). The open source version I have seen can fit a large fintech startup no problem.

tomhallett 4y ago
Sorry, I'm not referring to "end user credentials" which can be salted and hashed. I'm referring to user data which has to be stored in the database. For example, let's talk about the BI tool, mode.com. As a customer, I login to mode.com and click the "New Database Connection" button, where I get a screen to input the connection information for my postgres database: host, username, password, port, etc. If you are a developer at mode.com, what are the best practices to keeping `user_database_connections.password` secure? I can't hash the `password` column because I need to use the raw `password` when my code connects to the user's postgres database. I'm assuming I should encrypt the information, so an attacker who does a databse dump can't read the `user_database_connections` table, but what else should I do? Keep that information in a seperate database? seperate microservice? etc, etc. Other examples of tools which connect directly to the database(s) of the customer, so they store db creds of their customers in the saas database: - hightouch.com - fivetran.com - explo.com