Re: Spoofing as the postmaster

Mark Mielke wrote:
> Gregory Stark wrote:
> > "Mark Mielke" <mark@mark.mielke.cc> writes:
> >   
> >> UNIX socket kernel credential passing was mentioned in an earlier post, but I
> >> didn't see it raised again. 
> >>     
> >
> > I mentioned getsockopt(SO_PEERCRED) which isn't the same as credential
> > passing. It just tells you what uid is on the other end of your unix domain
> > socket.
> >
> > I think it's much more widespread and portable than credential passing which
> > was a BSD feature which allowed you to send along your kernel credentials to
> > another process. So you could, for example, open a file in psql then pass the
> > file descriptor to the backend to have the backend read directly from the
> > file
> I agree - I forgot there were different flavours. I think any of these 
> are just as good as SSL with public key authentication, and perhaps a 
> lot cheaper in terms of performance. The only piece of information 
> missing is the uid to compare against, which may as well be provided in 
> the db open parameters the same as any other parameters might be provided.

True, but if you are going to have the client check a uid we might as
well just put the socket file in a secure directory and be done with it.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://postgres.enterprisedb.com
 + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +