Re: Disabling trust/ident authentication configure option

On May 7, 2015 12:41 AM, "Heikki Linnakangas" <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi> wrote:
>
> On 05/07/2015 01:32 AM, Jim Nasby wrote:
>>
>> On 5/6/15 12:56 PM, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I think this is a sufficiently general requirement to warrant including
>>>>>
>>>>> an option to disable this, as most hardening guides I have seen for
>>>>> PostgreSQL unconditionally require to disable trust authentication and
>>>>> disabling it in the code removes the need to check this in the runtime
>>>>> configuration.
>>>
>>> I think people would be interested in well-thought out, generalized
>>> hardening facilities. But that would likely include other things than
>>> just disabling an authentication method or two. And we can't be adding
>>> a new compile-time option as we add each one. We need a more general
>>> approach.
>>
>>
>> Yeah. I think one of the big use cases here is that many environments
>> are OK with at least ident (if not trust) but only from the local
>> machine. So you'd probably want to handle that somehow.
>
>
> That's called 'peer', since 9.1.
>

There is also ident over localhost tcp. Since it only passes through the
local kernel, it can probably be considered quite secure (but requires an
extra piece of software to be installed, but that's easy). And provides a
usable option for those that can't use peer.

/Magnus