Should I use S3 pre-signed in order to server users' profile images?

Question

I have a chat application with the option to search for users by name/phone etc. As part of the design there is an avatar presents the user's profile image. I store the images in encrypted S3 bucket with private access only. In order to watch an image I'm using the aws sdk to pre-sign the url with expiration of few seconds.

I'm asking myself if this is a right thing to do, or it's an overkill to do that by the face that this is a profile image and probably a lot of users will see that list too many time in the app, and each list contains few users with their avatars so it is crating a lot of pre signed urls in short time.

What would you suggest?

Answer 1

If your application is a SaaS and/or needs SOC2 compliance(or another maybe), you should go for it. Because they don't allow any public S3 buckets used by your application AFAIK.