Giving the Admin role full read & write access to all entities on PROD

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Hello everyone ;)    I would like to know your opinion upon the following practice.    For debugging / figuring our very fast, issues on PROD environment I would like to give myself (only a developer) the admin role with full read or write access on all entities in the application. This helps a lot in viewing & inspecting data and figuring out really fast the root of a bug / issue. There's always the possiblity to give yourself access to a page where you can see all data about any entity.   Do you think this represents a security vulnerability? Do you think this is a bad practice? Do you happen to have an alternative? Do you think this is necessary? Is the risk worth it?      
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4 answers
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Given the situation that you have any data that is bound to privacy regulation, or any data-protection-regulation:

Do you think this represents a security vulnerability? Yes

Do you think this is a bad practice? Yes

Do you happen to have an alternative? Yes

Do you think this is necessary? Yes

Is the risk worth it? No

 

Most importantly: By law the GDPR does not allow you to grant your developers access to data at all.

The altenative is to test locally, or on any other test-environment (tst, acc, etc). You should not copy production data towards those environments, but if you do, then you should anonymise it first.

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Why not debug locally? Just download the database and replicate as that user the bugs / problems. Not that you do not need certain admin overview pages to easily view some data. But for debugging I would always just download the database and check locally the problem.

Regards,

Ronald

 

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I agree to the extent that it is often useful to have some type of elevated admin role, even in production. I'd be wary of giving them write access however, often just read will be enough for troubleshooting. You will often need dev-type roles anyway to be responsible for kicking off scripts an other post-release activities.

 

In a bigger company with more controls, this admin role is not a developer. In fact, every effort is taken to keep developers away from anything to do with prod. Instead this admin role is for a specific IT support staff, and access is carefully considered.

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Hi Marcian, 

Please make sure

  1.  you added Logs for all flows of integrations 
  2.  you have done error handling in the code 

 

 

 

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