Re: primary_conninfo missing from pg_stat_wal_receiver

On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 12:04 AM, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> Ugh.  I would certainly rather not have yet another special, hard-coded,
> bit of logic that magically makes things available to a superuser when
> it's not available to regular users.
> What that results in is the need to have a new default role to control
> access to that column for the non-superuser case.

OK, we could always update system_views.sql to revoke all rights from
public.. This ship has not sailed yet.

> As for the password showing up, sorry, but we need a solution for *that*
> regardless of the rest- the password shouldn't be exposed to anyone, nor
> should it be sent and kept in the backend's memory for longer than
> necessary.  I'm not suggesting we've got that figured out already, but
> that's where we should be trying to go.

This connection string is stored in shared memory in WalRcvData, and
that's the case for a couple of releases now, so it has already a high
footprint, though I agree that making that available at SQL level
makes it even worse. Looking at the code, as libpq does not link
directly to libpqcommon, I think that the cleanest solution is to do
something similar to wchar.c, aka split the parsing, deparsing
routines that we are going to use in a file located in src/backend/,
and then build libpq using it. Writing a patch for that would not be
that complicated. What is stored in WalRcvData is then the connection
string filtered of its password field, or we could just obfuscate it
with ***. It may still be useful to the user to know that a password
has been used.
-- 
Michael