Engineering
Building a safe "view as user" feature
Building an admin "view as user" feature? The safest version only ever mutates one field on the user object, never the session itself.
Most impersonation features swap the entire session context for the target user's. It's convenient, but it's also how support tooling quietly becomes a privilege-escalation vulnerability.
Narrow the scope
- Only mutate the field needed for UI rendering.
- Keep identity tied strictly to the admin session.
- Make sure permission-checking functions never read from overridable UI objects.
When identity and authorization stay untouched, there's no code path where "viewing as" can accidentally turn into "acting as".
How do you scope down high-privilege admin tooling in your stack?