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Core ConceptsUser Permissions

Cognee Multi-Tenant Permissions System

Overview

Cognee’s permissions system provides multi-tenant isolation. This feature enables complete separation of data contexts, ensuring that each tenant, project, or customer has isolated access to their data with no leakage between contexts.

Key Features

  • Complete Data Isolation: Each context gets separate graph and vector stores
  • Dataset-Level Permissions: Fine-grained control over data access (read, write, delete, share)
  • Multi-Tenant Architecture: Support for tenants, roles, and users with hierarchical permissions
  • File-Based Database Isolation: Uses Kuzu (graph database) and LanceDB (vector database) for complete separation

Configuration

To enable the permissions system, set the following environment variable:

ENABLE_BACKEND_ACCESS_CONTROL=True

Important: When this is enabled, Cognee will:

  • Ignore user-configured graph and vector database settings
  • Enforce the use of Kuzu (file-based graph db) and LanceDB (file-based vector db)
  • Deploy completely separate database instances per user per dataset

This approach ensures that each user and dataset combination gets completely separate database instances, preventing any possibility of data leakage between contexts.

Core Concepts

Permission Hierarchy

Tenant
├── Users (belong to tenant)
├── Roles (defined within tenant)
└── Datasets
    ├── Data (documents/files)
    └── Permissions (read, write, delete, share)

Tenants

Multi-tenant isolation containers that:

  • Group users and roles together
  • Provide organizational boundaries
  • Enable hierarchical permission management

Users

Individual system users who can:

  • Belong to a tenant (or operate without a tenant)
  • Have roles assigned within their tenant
  • Own and access datasets based on permissions
  • Be granted direct permissions on specific datasets

Roles

Permission groupings within tenants that:

  • Can be assigned to multiple users
  • Simplify permission management at scale
  • Inherit tenant-level defaults

Datasets

Data containers that:

  • Hold one or multiple documents/files
  • Have separate graph and vector stores per user
  • Support fine-grained permissions
  • Maintain complete isolation between users
Database Isolation Mechanism

The system creates separate database directories for each user-dataset combination:

.cognee_system/
├── databases/
│   ├── user_1/
│   │   ├── dataset_a/
│   │   │   ├── kuzu_graph/
│   │   │   └── lancedb_vectors/
│   │   └── dataset_b/
│   │       ├── kuzu_graph/
│   │       └── lancedb_vectors/
│   └── user_2/
│       └── dataset_a/
│           ├── kuzu_graph/
│           └── lancedb_vectors/

Permissions

Four types of permissions available:

  • read: View and search dataset contents
  • write: Add new data to the dataset
  • delete: Remove documents from the dataset
  • share: Grant permissions to other users

Permission Management

Permission Assignment Rules

  1. Dataset Creation: When a user creates a dataset, they automatically receive all permissions (read, write, delete, share)
  2. Permission Sharing: Only users with ‘share’ permission can grant permissions to others
  3. Access Control: All operations check permissions before execution
  4. Inheritance: Users can inherit permissions through roles and tenant

Access Control Logic

The system enforces permissions at multiple levels:

  1. Search Operations: Users can only search datasets they have ‘read’ permission for
  2. Data Addition: Requires ‘write’ permission on the target dataset
  3. Data Deletion: Requires ‘delete’ permission on the specific documents
  4. Permission Sharing: Requires ‘share’ permission on the dataset
ACL (Access Control List) Structure

Permissions are managed through a relational database with the following key tables:

  • principals: Base table for users, roles, and tenants
  • permissions: Defines available permission types (read, write, delete, share)
  • acls: Maps principals to data with specific permissions
  • dataset: Represents a group of documents/files (has links to the Data table for this information) with associated permissions

NOTE: All endpoints are available via Swagger documentation at localhost:8000/docs when running the Cognee backend.

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