Re: Updates of SE-PostgreSQL 8.4devel patches

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: "Robert Haas" <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>
Cc: "Bruce Momjian" <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us>, "KaiGai Kohei" <kaigai(at)ak(dot)jp(dot)nec(dot)com>, pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Updates of SE-PostgreSQL 8.4devel patches
Date: 2008-09-26 02:32:24
Message-ID: 5782.1222396344@sss.pgh.pa.us
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"Robert Haas" <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> I think you have to resign yourself to the fact that a user who can
> see only a subset of the rows in a table may very well see apparent
> foreign-key violations. But so what?

So you're leaking information about the rows that they're not supposed
to be able to see. This is not what I would call national-security-grade
information hiding --- leastwise *I* certainly wouldn't store nuclear
weapon design information in such a database. The people that the NSA
wants to defend against are more than smart enough, and persistent
enough, to extract information through such loopholes.

I can't escape the lurking suspicion that some bright folk inside the
NSA have spent years thinking about this and have come up with some
reasonably self-consistent definition of row hiding in a SQL database.
But have they published it where we can find it?

regards, tom lane

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