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Account spoofing is a very double edged sword. I recommend building very careful audit controls and very clear user feedback indicating that you are logged in "

Account spoofing is a very double edged sword. I recommend building very careful audit controls and very clear user feedback indicating that you are logged in "as" someone else. I loathe working with products where privilege escalation is officially implemented via account spoofing. icky!

nathancahill 3y ago
Yes, but in an early stage software where engineers already have read/write to prod, account spoofing is so much better. At a certain scale it needs to go away though, or be very tightly controlled/audited like you say.
neilv 3y ago
In addition to the audit controls, some kind of permission controls or model. Not just the ACLs you've established internally for which personnel can do what, but ensuring that you have express permission of that particular customer to be looking at that particular data of theirs, on that occasion.
Gigachad 3y ago
It's been fine when used as a tool for internal staff to resolve support issues. When the user reports they are seeing something funny on the page, you can go and see the page exactly as they see it without having to have their credentials. When it's given to the end users as a way to avoid having to build a proper permissions and sharing system, it's pretty gross.
ThalesX 3y ago
As mentioned before in this thread, I've implemented this for an early stage startup with some hundreds of thousands of users. It was a game changer in terms of helping our customers with some processes, and us understanding the shortfalls of our UX. On one hand, I have a backoffice that gives access to the staff to everything related to the customers, but on the other hand I'm supposed to believe that being able to 'impersonate' a customer is this highway to hell? As long as an audit log is held about who did what, this can go a long way forward. Are you Series A? B? A decacorn? Sure, implement whatever distributed tracing dashboard analytics data lake serverless microservice monitoring solution you can dream of. But this is good advice for early stage.

nathancahill 3y ago

Yes, but in an early stage software where engineers already have read/write to prod, account spoofing is so much better. At a certain scale it needs to go away though, or be very tightly controlled/audited like you say.

neilv 3y ago

In addition to the audit controls, some kind of permission controls or model. Not just the ACLs you've established internally for which personnel can do what, but ensuring that you have express permission of that particular customer to be looking at that particular data of theirs, on that occasion.

Gigachad 3y ago

It's been fine when used as a tool for internal staff to resolve support issues. When the user reports they are seeing something funny on the page, you can go and see the page exactly as they see it without having to have their credentials. When it's given to the end users as a way to avoid having to build a proper permissions and sharing system, it's pretty gross.

ThalesX 3y ago

As mentioned before in this thread, I've implemented this for an early stage startup with some hundreds of thousands of users. It was a game changer in terms of helping our customers with some processes, and us understanding the shortfalls of our UX. On one hand, I have a backoffice that gives access to the staff to everything related to the customers, but on the other hand I'm supposed to believe that being able to 'impersonate' a customer is this highway to hell? As long as an audit log is held about who did what, this can go a long way forward. Are you Series A? B? A decacorn? Sure, implement whatever distributed tracing dashboard analytics data lake serverless microservice monitoring solution you can dream of. But this is good advice for early stage.