Use case
When generating a report, the URL can be copied, shared and accessed by anyone, including external people, and as such appears to be a security concern.
Answer
The presigned URL provides access to content, for the duration of the TTL, to anyone that has it. It is the users responsibility to not share that URL with anyone else, same as the downloaded CSV file, same as any other confidential information.
What our application controls, is that only authenticated, authorised users can generate that URL in order to access the generated report. The users assigned access layers determine the content and also the ability to generate the URL for a specific resource.
Follow up queries
Can the Time to Live be reduced?
Even if the time was shorter, the report would still be available for a window of time. If we reduced the time from 10 minutes to a minute, it would not change this fact. There needs to be enough time for the user to act on the download of the report (or import to external application like PowerBI).
Can the ‘Copy to clipboard’ button be removed from the staff UI, when a report is generated.
The copy button is a representation of the link that is returned when you perform this process via the API. If we were to remove this functionality from the UI, it would be cosmetic and not removing this capability. The link will always exist and can be found via the API.
Will the URL’s always start with the same information?
Yes