Re: [0/4] Proposal of SE-PostgreSQL patches

On Tue, May 06, 2008 at 03:28:25PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> 
> The only documentation I've seen is
> 
> http://code.google.com/p/sepgsql/wiki/WhatIsSEPostgreSQL
> 
> which contains only examples of enforcing restrictions on *user*
> queries and tables.

I agree that, having just read that, anything that involves itself
with the system catalogues and such is way overstepping the stated
design goal.

There is an issue in most high-security systems having to do with
side-channel leakage of supposedly sensitive data.  So, the mere
exsistence of certain tables, columns, or users might be regarded as 
security-sensitive data.  I'm not sure I see how to get around that
without mucking in the areas that are causing some of the trouble.

But I think before we get into that discussion, a fairly clear
statement of exactly which problems are going to be in scope is
needed.

FWIW, I support and think important the row- and column- level access
controls this seems to be proposing, at least in principle.  Whether
that's a support that will extend to 2x overhead on everything is
rather a different matter.  Also, I am more than prepared to trade
away some cases in order to get a broadly useful functionality (so if
you can't hide the existence of a table, but all efforts to learn its
contents don't work, I might be willing to support that trade-off).

A

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Andrew Sullivan
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