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Comment by thezilch | Hacker News Reader

WTF? If you can't trust your network, OS, and user level access, how are you going to trust a DB ACL? I'll put everything up against Information Week using a caching layer (Re: memcached), which has unfettered access without security from an external layer. Non-NoSQL don't magically make security a non-issue; what a joke; in all cases, equally, one has to be aware and diligent about securing your network.

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Honestly, I don't think the ACL really provides much in terms of security. I mean, your db username and passwords are stored (in plain text) in your settings.py, config.php, database.yaml, etc. I've seen a few times where master passwords have shown up in a user's bash history due to carelessness. Also consider that your backup script contains read access credentials for all your data.

IMO the main benefit of having an ACL is to compartmentalizes your database so that a SQL injection against one app (maybe) won't spill over to a different app. That's not something that makes me feel good at all.

> WTF? If you can't trust your network, OS, and user level access ...

You can't trust them all equally, and allow for a failure in any one of them to result in a total failure of all security. That's the M&M security model -- crunchy on the outside.

This is one (of several reasons) I wouldn't use memcached without authentication if it could lead to a privilege increase: It completely breaks defense-in-depth. Compromise of just one system can lead to total system compromise.

The article's author/etc simply has an axe to grind with NoSQL. Are we going to throw out our *nix flavors that have us disable root SSH? Our FSes that don't have or disable-by-default block encryption? Security should definitely be championed, full stop, but I'm not convinced by this article that NoSQL or relational DBs have any reason to be implementing the secure layers on my systems.

A big draw to NoSQL is not only the ease of use. One advantage is the separation of working parts. Not jack of all trades, master of none architectures.

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