Re: Application name patch - v4

On Sunday 29 November 2009 00:47:49 Tom Lane wrote:
> Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> writes:
> > Updated application name patch, including a GUC assign hook to clean
> > the application name of any unsafe characters, per discussion.
>
> Applied with assorted editorialization. There were a couple of
> definitional issues that I don't recall if we had consensus on:
>
> 1. The patch prevents non-superusers from seeing other users'
> application names in pg_stat_activity. This seems at best pretty
> debatable to me. Yes, it supports usages in which you want to put
> security-sensitive information into the appname, but at the cost of
> disabling (perfectly reasonable) usages where you don't. If we made
> the app name universally visible, people simply wouldn't put security
> sensitive info in it, the same as they don't put it on the command line.
> Should we change this?
I personally would prefer if it were not protected and explicitly documented
as such - I cant really see a use case where one would want to store something
really private in there.

> (While I'm looking at it, I wonder why client_addr and client_port
> are similarly hidden.)
In a shared hosting environment this is somewhat sensible - afair some data
protection laws even require that nobody except the designated receiver of
information is able to get that information.
Whether shared hosting is sensible is another matter.

> 2. I am wondering if we should mark application_name as
> GUC_NO_RESET_ALL. As-is, the value sent at libpq initialization
> will be lost during RESET ALL, which would probably surprise people.
> On the other hand, not resetting it might surprise other people.
> If we were able to send it in the startup packet then this wouldn't
> be a problem, but we are far from being able to do that.
One possibility would be to make it possible to issue SETs that behave as if
set in a startup packet - imho its an implementation detail that SET currently
is used.

Andres