ndb.BlobProperty vs BlobStore: which is more private and more secure

Question

I have been reading all over stackoverflow concerning datastore vs blobstore for storing and retrieving image files. Everything is pointing towards blobstore except one: privacy and security.

In the datastore, the photos of my users are private: I have full control on who gets a blob. In the blobstore, however, anyone who knows the url can conceivable access my users photos? Is that true?

Here is a quote that is supposed to give me peace of mind, but it's still not clear. So anyone with the blob key can still access the photos? (from Store Photos in Blobstore or as Blobs in Datastore - Which is better/more efficient /cheaper?)

the way you serve a value out of the Blobstore is to accept a request to the app, then respond with the X-AppEngine-BlobKey header with the key. App Engine intercepts the outgoing response and replaces the body with the Blobstore value streamed directly from the service. Because app logic sets the header in the first place, the app can implement any access control it wants. There is no default URL that serves values directly out of the Blobstore without app intervention.

All of this is to ask: Which is more private and more secure for trafficking images, and why: datastore or blobstore? Or, hey, google-cloud-storage (which I know nothing about presently)

Kesler

I am also looking into this, I think the blobstore is the best for controlling access via handlers or services, which can have user access control – Remittent

And blobstore is similar to cloud storage from what I have read – Remittent

Answer 1

If you use google.appengine.api.images.get_serving_url then yes, the url returned is public. However the url returned is not guessable from a blob's key, nor does the url even exist before calling get_serving_url. (Or after calling delete_serving_url).

If you need access control on top of the data in the blobstore you can write your own handlers and add the access control there.

Photon

Answer 2

BlobProperty is just as private and secure as BlobStore, all depends on your application which serves the requests. your application can implement any permission checking before sending the contents to the user, so I don't see any difference as long as you serve all the images yourself and don't intentionally create publicly available URLs.

Actually, I would not even thinlk about storing photos in the BlobProperty, because this way the data ends up in the database instead of the BlobStore and it costs significantly more to store data in the database. BlobStore, on the other hand, is cheap and convenient.

Dachau