Re: pgaudit - an auditing extension for PostgreSQL

* Bruce Momjian (bruce(at)momjian(dot)us) wrote:
> On Sun, May 4, 2014 at 11:12:57AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> writes:
> > > * Abhijit Menon-Sen (ams(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com) wrote:
> > >> 1. I wish it were possible to prevent even the superuser from disabling
> > >> audit logging once it's enabled, so that if someone gained superuser
> > >> access without authorisation, their actions would still be logged.
> > >> But I don't think there's any way to do this.
> >
> > > Their actions should be logged up until they disable auditing and
> > > hopefully those logs would be sent somewhere that they're unable to
> > > destroy (eg: syslog). Of course, we make that difficult by not
> > > supporting log targets based on criteria (logging EVERYTHING to syslog
> > > would suck).
> >
> > > I don't see a way to fix this, except to minimize the amount of things
> > > requiring superuser to reduce the chances of it being compromised, which
> > > is something I've been hoping to see happen for a long time.
> >
> > Prohibiting actions to the superuser is a fundamentally flawed concept.
> > If you do that, you just end up having to invent a new "more super"
> > kind of superuser who *can* do whatever it is that needs to be done.
>
> We did create a "replication" role that could only read data, right? Is
> that similar?

Not sure which of the above discussions you're suggesting it's 'similar'
to, but a 'read-only' role (which is specifically *not* a superuser)
would definitely help reduce the number of things which need to run as
an actual 'superuser' (eg: pg_dump).

The above discussion was around having auditing which the superuser
couldn't change, which isn't really possible as a superuser can change
the code that's executing (modulo things like SELinux changing the
game, but that's outside PG to some extent).

Thanks,

Stephen