On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 1:50 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: >> One of the major and fundamental stumbling blocks we've run into is >> that every solution we've looked at so far seems to involve adding >> SE-Linux-specific checks in many places in the code. It would be nice >> if it were possible to use the exist permissions-checking functions >> and have them check a few more things while they're at it, but it's >> looking like that won't be feasible, or at least no one's come up with >> a plausible design yet. > > I don't think that it's about SELinux. The real issue here is that > KaiGai-san is about a mile out in front of the PG hackers community > in terms of his ambitions for the scope of what can be controlled by > security policy. If the patch were only doing what the community has > actually agreed to, there would be little need for it to touch anything > but the aclcheck functions. > > Now I recognize that a large part of the potential attraction in this > for the security community is exactly the idea of having fine-grain > security control. But if you ever want anything significantly different > from SQL-standard permission mechanisms, there's going to have to be a > whole lot more work done. Basically, nobody in the PG community has got > any confidence either in the overall design or the implementation > details for locking things down that aren't already controlled by SQL > permission mechanisms.
I think that's basically right. Further, I think this is basically a resource issue. If you were inclined to spend a large amount of your time on this problem, you could either gain confidence in the present design and implementation or come up with a new one in which you did have confidence. But it doesn't seem important enough to you (or your employer) for the amount of time it would take, so you're not. I think there are other committers and community members in a similar situation - basically all of them. ...Robert -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
