Security for server client libraries

When you use the server client libraries for Firestore, you can manage access to your resources with Identity and Access Management (IAM). IAM lets you give more granular access to specific Google Cloud resources and prevents unwanted access to other resources. This page describes the IAM permissions and roles for Firestore. For a detailed description of IAM, read the IAM documentation .

IAM lets you adopt the security principle of least privilege , so you grant only the necessary access to your resources.

IAM lets you control who (user)has what (role)permission for whichresources by setting IAM policies. IAM policies grant one or more roles to a user, giving the user certain permissions. For example, you can grant the datastore.indexAdmin role to a user, which allows the user to create, modify, delete, list, or view indexes.

Permissions and roles

This section summarizes the permissions and roles that Firestore supports.

Required permissions for API methods

The following table lists the permissions that the caller must have to perform each action:

Predefined roles

With IAM, every API method in Firestore requires that the account making the API request has the appropriate permissions to use the resource. Permissions are granted by setting policies that grant roles to a user, group, or service account. In addition to the primitive roles, owner, editor, and viewer , you can grant Firestore roles to the users of your project.

The following table lists the Firestore IAM roles. You can grant multiple roles to a user, group, or service account.

Custom roles

If the predefined roles don't address your business requirements, you can define your own custom roles with permissions that you specify:

• Learn about custom roles.
• Create and manage custom roles.

Required roles to create and manage tags

If any tag is represented in create or restore actions, some roles are required. See Creating and managing tags for more details on creating tag key-value pairs before associate them to the database resources.

The following listed permissions are required.

View tags

• datastore.databases.listTagBindings
• datastore.databases.listEffectiveTags

Manage tags on resources

The following permission is required for the database resource you're attaching the tag value.

• datastore.databases.createTagBinding

Permissions

The following table lists the permissions that Firestore supports.

Role change latency

Firestore caches IAM permissions for 5 minutes, so it takes up to 5 minutes for a role change to become effective.

Manage Firestore IAM

You can get and set IAM policies using the Google Cloud console, the IAM API, or the gcloud command-line tool. See Granting, Changing, and Revoking Access to Project Members for details.

Configure conditional access permissions

You can use IAM Conditions to define and enforce conditional access control.

For example, the following condition assigns a principal the datastore.user role up until a specified date:

  { 
  
 "role" 
 : 
  
 "roles/datastore.user" 
 , 
  
 "members" 
 : 
  
 [ 
  
 "user:travis@example.com" 
  
 ], 
  
 "condition" 
 : 
  
 { 
  
 "title" 
 : 
  
 "Expires_December_1_2023" 
 , 
  
 "description" 
 : 
  
 "Expires on December 1, 2023" 
 , 
  
 "expression" 
 : 
  
 "request.time < timestamp('2023-12-01T00:00:00.000Z')" 
  
 } 
 } 
 

To learn how to define IAM Conditions for temporary access, see Configure temporary access .

To learn how to configure IAM Conditions for access to one or more databases, see Configure database access conditions .

Security rule dependency on IAM

Firestore Security Rules for mobile/web clients depend on the following service account and IAM binding:

Firebase automatically sets up this service account for you. If you remove the firebaserules.system role from this service account, your security rules will deny all requests. To restore this IAM binding, use the following gcloud CLI command:

 gcloud 
  
 projects 
  
 add 
 - 
 iam 
 - 
 policy 
 - 
 binding 
  
  project_id 
 
  
 \ 
 --member=serviceAccount:service- project_number 
@firebase-rules.iam.gserviceaccount.com \ 
 --role=roles/firebaserules.system 

To determine your project_id and project_number , see Identifying projects .

Use the Google Cloud CLI instead of the Google Cloud console, because the firebaserules.system role is hidden in the console by default.

What's next

• Learn more about IAM .
• Grant IAM roles .
• Learn about authentication .