I am seeking to have a system in which it is never necessary for application code to "go root" w/respect to the database server, where all commands issued to a server are as a regular logged in user with their privileges.

There are two holes I know of here. Thanks to Tom I've got the answer to the first one: which is creating users. We will implement stored procedures that create users and grant privileges, and then grant execute privileges to these stored procedures. This means we don't have to "go root" to grant membership in groups.

The last one left that I have is the sticky issue of a paypal IPN transaction coming in. I believe it applies generally to financial transactions. The user is sent by our application to the Paypal site. When they pay, paypal sends a POST with various information that we need. The user does not see this, it is behind the scenes. The POST request must run as an anonymous user because I have no state whatsoever. But the request must also commit financial data. This creates a vulnerability, at least in theory. There are fields contained in the transaction meant to allow confirmation and prevent fraud, but I just don't like that idea of running anonymously and committing financial data.

In this case it seems creating a stored procedure will not automatically help, as then we just execute the SP anonymously, and it strikes me as no different.

Has anybody pondered this and come up with anything?

--
Kenneth Downs
Secure Data Software, Inc.
www.secdat.com    www.andromeda-project.org
631-689-7200   Fax: 631-689-0527
cell: 631-379-0010


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