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Hi!

The encryption will hold off hackers who only have access to your database. If they also have access to your filesystem, they can recover the secret key used for the encryption of the parameters and eventually decrypt them. In that case, they'd have full access to everything inside that bucket.

Well, there are quite a few possibilities here. For starters, you can create a different user for each bucket, using Amazon IAM Policies, and give him read/write access only to a specific subdirectory in your bucket. Just read our Amazon S3 integration walkthrough where we explain how's that possible. This method won't prevent a hacker who pwned your site from accessing your backups.

The other possibility is to create a write-only Amazon S3 user and use that instead. As you observed, that would render the quotas ineffective, as the user would be unable to delete old backups. However this is the most secure option, as a potential hacker can never access your backups (download or delete).

There is a middle ground. You can create an Amazon S3 user with write and delete privileges using Amazon IAM Policies. This allows you to have a user who can upload the backup archives and apply the quotas. Akeeba Backup doesn't need browse access to apply the quotas (it has the paths stored in the database), it just needs to be able to run DeleteObject. In case you're hacked, the attacker won't be able to download any backup archives but he will be able to delete existing backups if he goes through all the pain in deciphering the settings, dumping the ak_stats table, figuring out the paths to the backup files and write a script to delete them (visual tools won't work without browse access).

IMHO, the last method is the best compromise between security and ease of use. The only thing you can't do is to transfer the backup archives from S3 to your server for easy restoration. But this is easy to work around; just go to the Configuration page and enter your regular access credentials before using the Manage Remote Files feature of Akeeba Backup :)

I hope this information helps!

Hi!

Only one group, having no permissions whatsoever set up for the bucket.

One user per site, yes.

Attach the PutObject and DeleteObject policy to each user, yes.

Fill in each user's access credentials (Access and Secret Key) in Akeeba Backup, yes.

I think that this should be a very solid setup. Well, if you get stuck somewhere, ping me :)

Aw, snap, I forgot to add that in the user's guide :s Thank you for the reminder, I am adding this info to the manual right now.

Just a note: that post describes how to give only the PutObject privilege to the user. You should also add the DeleteObject privilege for quotas to work :)

OK, cool :)