Re: Special role for subscriptions

Greetings,

* Petr Jelinek (petr(dot)jelinek(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com) wrote:
> On 23/03/2019 02:38, Michael Paquier wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 08:41:06PM +0800, Andrey Borodin wrote:
> >> 22 марта 2019 г., в 19:17, Petr Jelinek <petr(dot)jelinek(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> написал(а):
> >>> I still don't like that we are running the subscription workers as
> >>> superuser even for subscriptions created by regular user. That has
> >>> plenty of privilege escalation issues in terms of how user functions are
> >>> run (we execute triggers, index expressions etc, in that worker).
> >>
> >> Yes, this is important concern, thanks! I think it is not a big deal
> >> to run worker without superuser privileges too.
>
> Yes we should run without superuser privileges but perhaps more
> importantly we need to so me kind of security checks on tables while
> applying - the fact that the user had access to a table when
> subscription was created does not mean it will have it in 5 minutes and
> given our low level API usage in the worker, there is currently no check
> for that.

Agreed, and that's exactly the same as what I was telling Andrey at
PGConf APAC when he and I were discussing the subscription role. The
specific suggestion that I had was to check for every transaction,
though that was a pretty off-the-cuff idea and someone might have a
better one, certainly.

> > FWIW, the argument from Petr is very scary. So please let me think
> > that it is a pretty big deal.
> >
> >> Yes, this patch is a pure security implication and nothing else.
> >
> > And this is especially *why* it needs careful screening.
>
> Yep that was exactly my point.
>
> I agree the feature is important, it just does not seem like the patch
> is RFC and given security implications I err on the side of safety here.

Agreed.

Thanks!

Stephen