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Security

nilalytics is token‑authenticated and read‑restricted by default.

Ingest authentication

The OTLP server requires a Bearer token (NILA_OTLP_TOKEN). Unauthenticated writes are rejected (401). In production, clients never hold this token — they go through the gateway with short‑lived tokens.

Short‑lived client tokens

The gateway issues HMAC‑signed tokens that expire (default 15 min). The value a client ships is the ingest key, which can only mint write tokens (not read data) and is rotatable. The internal ingest token never leaves the host.

Read‑only query authorization

Quack clients (dashboards, DuckDB‑WASM) are restricted by a server‑side policy that blocks destructive statements — INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, DROP, ALTER, CREATE, ATTACH, DETACH, COPY, TRUNCATE, INSTALL, LOAD. Reads and maintenance functions are allowed; data cannot be tampered with or exfiltrated by attaching external databases.

Note

This is a defense‑in‑depth guard on top of the Quack token. For strict multi‑tenant isolation, use per‑tenant tokens/prefixes (roadmap).

Startup guard

For a remote S3 endpoint, the server refuses to start if TLS is off or the default minioadmin credentials are used. GCS/R2/Azure are validated for required credentials.

Secrets at rest

Generated tokens/salt/keys are stored in <data dir>/.nila_secrets.json with mode 0600 (owner‑only), inside a directory that is git‑ignored. Set them explicitly via env in production and rotate them yourself.

Object‑storage credentials

The server holds the storage credentials so clients don't. Use scoped, least‑privilege keys per deployment (write‑limited to your prefix). For S3, you can supply short‑lived STS credentials via NILA_S3_SESSION_TOKEN.

Privacy / PII

  • user.id is a salted hash computed client‑side — the lake can't reverse it to a real identity. See Identity.
  • No fingerprinting.
  • Error stacktraces and event attributes are stored as sent — mask sensitive fields client‑side and add a consent flag to honor opt‑outs.

Transport

  • Terminate TLS at the gateway (cert/key) or a reverse proxy.
  • Keep the internal OTLP server and Quack catalog bound to localhost; expose only the gateway.