POST_START

Comparing Authorization Between Development and Production Catalogs

I recently needed to understand the authorization differences between our development and production catalogs in Unity Catalog. This was important because we were planning to move some data from the development environment to production, and we wanted to ensure that the access controls were properly aligned with our security policies.

Checking Catalog Grants in Development

I started by checking the grants on the development catalog to see what permissions were in place. I ran the following SQL command:

SHOW GRANTS ON CATALOG development;

I saw a representative result like this:

principal | actionType | objectType
data_analysts | SELECT | TABLE
data_engineers | MODIFY | TABLE

This showed that the data_analysts role had SELECT access to tables in the development catalog, while data_engineers had MODIFY access. I noted that this was a common setup for development environments, where different roles have varying levels of access to support collaboration and testing.

Checking Catalog Grants in Production

Next, I wanted to compare this with the production catalog. I ran the same command on the production catalog:

SHOW GRANTS ON CATALOG production;

I saw a representative result like this:

principal | actionType | objectType
data_analysts | SELECT | TABLE
data_engineers | MODIFY | TABLE

To my surprise, the grants on the production catalog were identical to those on the development catalog. This raised a question: why were the permissions the same in both environments? I realized that this might indicate a lack of fine-grained access control in production, which could pose a security risk.

Checking Schema Grants in Production

To dig deeper, I decided to check the grants on a specific schema within the production catalog. I chose the sales schema, as it was a critical part of our data pipeline:

SHOW GRANTS ON SCHEMA production.sales;

I saw a representative result like this:

principal | actionType | objectType
data_analysts | SELECT | TABLE
data_engineers | MODIFY | TABLE

This confirmed that the schema-level permissions were also the same as those in the development catalog. I realized that this might be a misconfiguration, as production environments typically require stricter access controls to protect sensitive data.

Understanding the Implications

I took a moment to reflect on what I had learned. The fact that the grants were the same across both environments meant that the development and production catalogs were not properly isolated in terms of access. This could lead to potential data exposure or unauthorized modifications in the production environment.

I decided to document these findings and recommend that we review and adjust the access controls in the production catalog to ensure that only authorized roles have the necessary permissions. This would help maintain the security and integrity of our production data.