Firebase: Google Cloud's Evil Twin

Firebase allows a frontend application to connect directly to a backend database. Security wonks might think the previous sentence describes a vulnerability, but this is by design. Released in 2012, Firebase was a revolutionary cloud product that set out to 'Make Servers Optional'. This should raise countless red flags for all security professionals as the application server traditionally serves as the intermediary between the frontend and backend, handling authentication and authorization. Without it, all users could obtain full access to the database. Firebase attempts to solve this by moving authentication and authorization into the database engine itself. Unfortunately, this approach has several flaws.