Re: Is this a security risk?

On 17 Dec 2008, at 07:48, Albe Laurenz wrote:

> Adam Witney wrote:
>> I would like to provide a limited view of my database to some users,
>> so i thought of creating a second database (I can control access by
>> IP
>> address through pg_hba.conf) with some views that queried the first
>> database using dblink.
>
> In my opinion dblink is not the right tool for that.
> It will require a user account on the "secret" database through which
> dblink accesses it. You'd have to restrict permissions for that user
> if you want to keep the thing secure.
>
> So why not access the "secret" database directly with that user and
> get rid of the added difficulty of dblink?
>
> You can rely on the permission system. Just grant the user the
> appropriate
> privileges on the necessary objects, and if you need the user to see
> only part of the data in a table, create a view for that.

thanks for your reply,

The user already has permissions within the 'secret' database, but
normally they interact with it through a web interface only. I was
worried that the user could get in and mess around with other things,
such as the sequences which are used to populate primary keys.

Also ideally I only wanted to create a read only access to certain
parts of the database, I couldn't think of any other way to do it...
are there any more standard ways of doing this?

thanks again

adam