Extending Apache Doris Authorization: Building a Custom Access Controller for Agentic Workloads

About this session

AI agents make database access more dynamic: a single agent may act on behalf of multiple users, while each request may require a different authorization decision. This creates new challenges for enforcing least-privilege access without putting application-specific policy logic around the database. This session walks through the authorization extension points in Apache Doris and shows how to build a custom Access Controller using the existing AccessControllerFactory SPI. The implementation uses OpenFGA as an external policy engine, while Apache Ranger serves as the in-tree reference implementation and comparison point. The session includes a live multi-user agent demo against a running OpenFGA store. Two end users access the same internal catalog through one agent, and a policy tuple is added during the demo to show the same query changing from allowed to denied. The OpenFGA store is then stopped to demonstrate how the controller fails closed when the external policy service is unavailable. The session also shows the resulting audit records and examines the trade-offs of putting external authorization checks on the query path, including policy consistency, caching, latency, and failure handling. You will leave with a practical view of how Apache Doris authorization can be extended beyond its built-in privilege model, how an external relationship-based policy engine such as OpenFGA can fit into the authorization flow, and which correctness, performance, and operational considerations to validate before taking a custom access controller into production.

Speaker

Arpit Jain

Graduate Student · Supply-Chain Security Researcher · MIT

Grad student at MIT. Supply-chain security researcher. 24 published CVEs credited by name, including a critical authorization flaw in pgAdmin 4 and several in Red Hat products, where the vendor advisories carry a named acknowledgement. Over 650 merged contributions across 200 open-source organizations including apache, google, kubernetes-sigs, containerd, prometheus, sigstore, OWASP, NASA and NIST, most of them security or supply-chain hardening. Builds mitigation-aware CI/CD vulnerability scanners. Active contributor to CNCF, sigstore and SLSA, OpenSSF, and US federal government projects.

LinkedIn ↗ · Arpit Jain