Re: RLS Design

* Robert Haas (robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 3:42 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> >> > An interesting question we haven't much considered is: who can set up
> >> > policies and add then to users? Maybe we should flip this around, and
> >> > instead of adding users to policies, we should exempt users from
> >> > policies.
> >> >
> >> > CREATE POLICY p1;
> >> >
> >> > And then, if they own p1 and t1, they can do:
> >> >
> >> > ALTER TABLE t1 SET POLICY p1 TO t1_p1_quals;
> >> > (or maybe we should associate it to the policy instead of the table:
> >> > ALTER POLICY p1 SET TABLE t1 TO t1_p1_quals)
> >> >
> >> > And then the policy applies to everyone who doesn't have the grantable
> >> > EXEMPT privilege on the policy. The policy owner and superuser have
> >> > that privilege by default and it can be handed out to others like
> >> > this:
> >> >
> >> > GRANT EXEMPT ON POLICY p1 TO snowden;
> >> >
> >> > Then users who have row_level_security=on will bypass RLS if possible,
> >> > and otherwise it will be applied. Users who have
> >> > row_level_security=off will bypass RLS if possible, and otherwise
> >> > error. And users who have row_level_security=force will apply RLS
> >> > even if they are entitled to bypass it.
> >>
> >> That's interesting. I need to think some more about what that means.
> >
> > I'm not a fan of the EXEMPT approach..
>
> Just out of curiosity, why not?

I don't see it as really solving the flexibility need and it feels quite
a bit more complicated to reason about. Would someone who is EXEMPT
from one policy on a given table still have other policies on that table
applied to them? Would a user be able to be EXEMPT from multiple
policies? I feel like that's what you're suggesting with this approach,
otherwise I don't see it as really different from the 'DIRECT SELECT'
privilege discussed previously..

Thanks,

Stephen