🏗️ System DesignID:
multi-tenant-partitioning-rbacMulti-Tenant Partitioning & RBAC
企业级多租户隔离与 RBAC 权限
🎯Core Definition
Multi-Tenant Partitioning & Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) enforces strict physical/logical isolation and granular access authorization across B2B SaaS customers and sensitive enterprise departments (HR, Legal, Finance); the security architecture encompasses: 1) Vector Store Partitioning tiers (Metadata Filtering with strict `tenant_id` invariants, Namespace/Collection isolation, or dedicated physical clusters); 2) Chunk-Level RBAC ACL Inheritance, embedding user/group ACL permissions directly into chunk payloads during ingestion; 3) Pre-Filtering Retrieval Authorization, where the user's cryptographically verified JWT IAM claims are injected into vector search predicates upfront before ANN execution.
💡Use Cases
Multi-tenant enterprise LLM assistants, B2B knowledge management SaaS, and compliance-sensitive financial/healthcare RAG portals.
⚡Key Problems Solved
Post-Filtering (filtering after retrieval) can drop all Top-K candidates due to permission blocks, returning empty answers or leaking metadata titles; Pre-Filtering guarantees zero cross-tenant leakage and absolute compliance.
🎯5 High-Frequency Exam Points
1
Compare Metadata Filtering, Collection Namespaces, and Physical Cluster Isolation across cost, isolation security, and query latency?
2
Why does secure RAG mandate Pre-Filtering (ACL masking during HNSW graph traversal) rather than Post-Filtering after candidate generation?
3
Design IAM token parsing at the gateway that flattens LDAP/Active Directory organizational hierarchies into chunk-level ACL filters?
4
How to handle immediate permission revocation upon employee departures without re-embedding millions of vector chunks?
5
Design tamper-proof audit logging and AES-256 encryption at rest/transit to pass SOC2 and GDPR multi-tenant enterprise audits?
📖 In-depth Guide:📄 llm-rag-agent-system-design →
Updated 2026-08-14🎯
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