Question about Python Script Execution Refresh Security

[Anonymous]

Goal

• We have a enterprise/private API endpoint that exposes data we want to analyze via power bi.  Intially, our idea was to scrape this endpoint using the web data connector; however, we do not want to expose or put the authenticaiton credentials to this endpoint in the cloud as they contain super user privileges, so we are looking for ways to mitigate that risk.
• Instead we setup a python script that scrapes the data and loads it into a dataframe
  • Credentials to authenticate are stored in a seperate file and referenced in during script execution
• Intent is to use a personal gateway to keep the dataset up to date.

Questions

• Does this method expose our credentials to the cloud, or gateway in anyway?
  • E.g. does power bi service upload the code after it's interpeted to either the gateway or the service?
  • Or becuase we are just referenceing a config file, the scope of the execution (/exposure of creentials) is just locally on the computer that is hosting the personal gateway.

Thanks in advance for the help!

[v-xuding-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous ,

No, Power BI will not upload the code and the credentials. The Power BI service is built on Azure, which is Microsoft’s cloud computing infrastructure and platform. The Power BI service architecture is based on two clusters – the Web Front End (WFE) cluster and the Back-End cluster. The WFE cluster manages the initial connection and authentication to the Power BI service, and once authenticated, the Back-End handles all subsequent user interactions. Power BI uses Azure Active Directory (AAD) to store and manage user identities, and manages the storage of data and metadata using Azure BLOB and Azure SQL Database, respectively. For More details, you could reference the document : Power BI Security .

Best Regards,

Xue Ding

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Anonymous]

Fantastic, thanks for the reply and explanation!