Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System

Determining whether online users are authorized to access digital objects is central to preserving privacy. This talk presents the design, implementation, and deployment of Zanzibar, a global system for storing and evaluating access control lists. Zanzibar provides a uniform data model and configuration language for expressing a wide range of access control policies from hundreds of client services at Google, including Calendar, Cloud, Drive, Maps, Photos, and YouTube. Its authorization decisions respect causal ordering of user actions and thus provide external consistency amid changes to access control lists and object contents. Zanzibar scales to trillions of access control lists and millions of authorization requests per second to support services used by billions of people. It has maintained 95th-percentile latency of less than 10 milliseconds and availability of greater than 99.999% over 3 years of production use.
 

Bio: Ramón Cáceres is a software engineer at Google. He was previously a researcher at AT&T Labs and IBM Research. His areas of focus include computer systems and networks, mobile computing services and applications, and location data analysis and modeling. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Distinguished Scientist.

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