The User Management is the most Fundamental Functionality of absolutely every Application and platform around the Internet and technology. It doesn’t matter the additional layers, wrappings, contexts and domain areas. You can read that I have touched the topic before in my articles
- are you in control of your technology,
- implementation of the same programming concepts in the same apps.
Hardware Access
If a person gets access to the hardware that stores some data he or she could gain access to the files. You’ve made a storage encrypted – good. It’s going to be a little bit harder but not totally impossible. Access control to – who has access to what and who has touched what – is essential.
BIOS/OS Admin
If the hardware layer is secure, another layer are the software systems that execute control on very low level. Several years ago there was a leak how the Intel BIOS system had bugs. The next level operating systems like Linux windows and macOS have publicly available bugs all the time.
Many of these systems have administration interfaces for what operating system user has access to what rules permissions file system folders and so on. At last point, they need to install the software that will be additionally exposed to higher level application administrators or developers.
Database Admin
Many database systems have encryption build-in so to make the life of a system administrator or hardware administrator harder if they try to do something fishy. Also, all serious database management systems have user, roles, responsibilities and access administration.
Application Server Admin
At some point service that are built are exposed to other application components or even to the broad public. Application server admin oversees the computation, monitors that load, the performance and other characteristics of the software, so they could tune up the service. You could read more about the different roles in software development in my previous article.
Application Admin
One application server could host several applications. Every individual app could decide to have a separate administrator for the data, of the users and many other specific characteristics of an application. Identical role-based access could be programmed specifically.
Users & Roles Admin
The least powerful users on the ones that have permissions to only the end of the layers of the software.
Web 1.0
During the first phase of the evolution of the internet, there was minimal amount of user rows and stuff around it. A relational database systems that power most of the internet were then in their childhood. The websites and the platforms that integrated them then or were few of the survivors of the .com Bubble. Most of the sites were static web pages with minimal dynamic content. More about the evolution of the internet you can read here.
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/web-1-0-web-2-0-and-web-3-0-with-their-difference/
Web 2.0
The second phase of the internet is when all sites and platforms offer user registration and offer the users some functionality. The big winners were those that attract most amount of users with functionality for free and making money in some other more sneaky way.
Social Media
Social media companies are the websites that embraced the web 2.0 and merged the functionality with the appeared 15 years ago – mobile platforms and technologies. Most of their functionality is free for the general user and the making money is obfuscated with selling data to those that wish to advertise on the users that the Platforms own.
Web 3.0
12 years ago appeared a new paradigm that fights the financial system primarily. But technically speaking – it evolved to offer a lot more. Idealistically – a user could have total – technical and absolute – control on their accounts and on their content that they publish to the internet. And this is done with the blockchain technology that is currently a little bit expensive to execute. This is if everything is coded in perfectly decentralized way.
Crypto Wallet
The crypto wallet is the identical concept like the biometrically secured private key on your phone – with your fingerprint your face or some other technology. The hardware cold storage for crypto assets is identical as the hardware personnel identifier. It is issued by some approved institutions to execute some reporting and accounting for the different governments around the world. It is the tool to store your user account access control.
Smart Contracts
There is something fishy about this smart contracts. You deploy them on a publicly available blockchain. if no proper access controls are programmed everybody could execute the logic. If the user has the cryptocurrencies of the blockchain – he will be able to execute them.
So – You need to program identical user management – onto the smart contracts so no hacking and unwanted execution of logic to be processed and finished. If no restriction is programmed – it will kill personalization, the exclusiveness and many more features that many platforms and users expect.
You can see by now – it doesn’t matter that it is a new technology platform or protocol. If you have the need to integrate with a lot of people – you will be required to implement user management. Also if you archive success – also role based access to different functionalities will be needed – no matter what you choose.