We have had support for restrictive RLS policies since 9.5, but they
were only available through extensions which use the appropriate hooks.
This adds support into the grammer, catalog, psql and pg_dump for
restrictive RLS policies, thus reducing the cases where an extension is
necessary.
In passing, also move away from using "AND"d and "OR"d in comments.
As pointed out by Alvaro, it's not really appropriate to attempt
to make verbs out of "AND" and "OR", so reword those comments which
attempted to.
Reviewed By: Jeevan Chalke, Dean Rasheed
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20160901063404.GY4028@tamriel.snowman.net
Commit 43cd468cf0 added some wording to create_policy.sgml purporting
to warn users against a race condition of the sort that had been noted some
time ago by Peter Geoghegan. However, that warning was far too vague to be
useful (or at least, I completely failed to grasp what it was on about).
Since the problem case occurs with a security design pattern that lots of
people are likely to try to use, we need to be as clear as possible about
it. Provide a concrete example in the main-line docs in place of the
original warning.
Clarify that SELECT policies are now applied when SELECT rights
are required for a given query, even if the query is an UPDATE or
DELETE query. Pointed out by Noah.
Additionally, note the risk regarding concurrently open transactions
where a relation which controls access to the rows of another relation
are updated and the rows of the primary relation are also being
modified. Pointed out by Peter Geoghegan.
Back-patch to 9.5.
The newly added ON CONFLICT clause allows to specify an alternative to
raising a unique or exclusion constraint violation error when inserting.
ON CONFLICT refers to constraints that can either be specified using a
inference clause (by specifying the columns of a unique constraint) or
by naming a unique or exclusion constraint. DO NOTHING avoids the
constraint violation, without touching the pre-existing row. DO UPDATE
SET ... [WHERE ...] updates the pre-existing tuple, and has access to
both the tuple proposed for insertion and the existing tuple; the
optional WHERE clause can be used to prevent an update from being
executed. The UPDATE SET and WHERE clauses have access to the tuple
proposed for insertion using the "magic" EXCLUDED alias, and to the
pre-existing tuple using the table name or its alias.
This feature is often referred to as upsert.
This is implemented using a new infrastructure called "speculative
insertion". It is an optimistic variant of regular insertion that first
does a pre-check for existing tuples and then attempts an insert. If a
violating tuple was inserted concurrently, the speculatively inserted
tuple is deleted and a new attempt is made. If the pre-check finds a
matching tuple the alternative DO NOTHING or DO UPDATE action is taken.
If the insertion succeeds without detecting a conflict, the tuple is
deemed inserted.
To handle the possible ambiguity between the excluded alias and a table
named excluded, and for convenience with long relation names, INSERT
INTO now can alias its target table.
Bumps catversion as stored rules change.
Author: Peter Geoghegan, with significant contributions from Heikki
Linnakangas and Andres Freund. Testing infrastructure by Jeff Janes.
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas, Andres Freund, Robert Haas, Simon Riggs,
Dean Rasheed, Stephen Frost and many others.
In commit 31eae6028e, some documents were not updated to show the new
capability; fix that. Also, the error message you get when CURRENT_USER
and SESSION_USER are used in a context that doesn't accept them could be
clearer about it being a problem only in those contexts; so add the
word "here".
Author: Kyotaro HORIGUCHI
His patch submission also included changes to GRANT/REVOKE, but those
seemed more controversial, so I left them out. We can reconsider these
changes later.
The RLS capability is built on top of the WITH CHECK OPTION
system which was added for auto-updatable views, however, unlike
WCOs on views (which are mandated by the SQL spec to not fire until
after all other constraints and checks are done), it makes much more
sense for RLS checks to happen earlier than constraint and uniqueness
checks.
This patch reworks the structure which holds the WCOs a bit to be
explicitly either VIEW or RLS checks and the RLS-related checks are
done prior to the constraint and uniqueness checks. This also allows
better error reporting as we are now reporting when a violation is due
to a WITH CHECK OPTION and when it's due to an RLS policy violation,
which was independently noted by Craig Ringer as being confusing.
The documentation is also updated to include a paragraph about when RLS
WITH CHECK handling is performed, as there have been a number of
questions regarding that and the documentation was previously silent on
the matter.
Author: Dean Rasheed, with some kabitzing and comment changes by me.
In ALTER POLICY, use 'check_expression' instead of 'expression' for the
parameter, to match up with the recent CREATE POLICY change.
In CREATE POLICY, frame the discussion as granting access to rows
instead of limiting access to rows. Further, clarify that the
expression must return true for rows to be visible/allowed and that a
false or NULL result will mean the row is not visible/allowed.
Per discussion with Dean Rasheed and Robert.
The parameter description for the using_expression and check_expression
in CREATE POLICY were unclear and arguably included a typo. Clarify
and improve the consistency of that language.
Pointed out by Dean Rasheed.
The syntax for CREATE POLICY simply used "expression" for the USING
expression, while the WITH CHECK expression was "check_expression".
Given that we have two expressions, it's sensible to explcitly name both
to maintain clarity.
This patch simply changes the generic "expression" to be
"using_expression".
Pointed out by Peter Geoghegan.
The CREATE POLICY documention didn't sufficiently clarify what happens
when a given command type (eg: ALL or UPDATE) accepts both USING and
WITH CHECK clauses, but only the USING clause is defined. Add language
to clarify that, in such a case, the USING clause will be used for both
USING and WITH CHECK cases.
Pointed out by Peter Geoghegan.
As pointed out by Robert, we should really have named pg_rowsecurity
pg_policy, as the objects stored in that catalog are policies. This
patch fixes that and updates the column names to start with 'pol' to
match the new catalog name.
The security consideration for COPY with row level security, also
pointed out by Robert, has also been addressed by remembering and
re-checking the OID of the relation initially referenced during COPY
processing, to make sure it hasn't changed under us by the time we
finish planning out the query which has been built.
Robert and Alvaro also commented on missing OCLASS and OBJECT entries
for POLICY (formerly ROWSECURITY or POLICY, depending) in various
places. This patch fixes that too, which also happens to add the
ability to COMMENT on policies.
In passing, attempt to improve the consistency of messages, comments,
and documentation as well. This removes various incarnations of
'row-security', 'row-level security', 'Row-security', etc, in favor
of 'policy', 'row level security' or 'row_security' as appropriate.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Andres pointed out that there was an extra ';' in equalPolicies, which
made me realize that my prior testing with CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS was
insufficient (it didn't always catch the issue, just most of the time).
Thanks to that, a different issue was discovered, specifically in
equalRSDescs. This change corrects eqaulRSDescs to return 'true' once
all policies have been confirmed logically identical. After stepping
through both functions to ensure correct behavior, I ran this for
about 12 hours of CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS runs of the regression tests
with no failures.
In addition, correct a few typos in the documentation which were pointed
out by Thom Brown (thanks!) and improve the policy documentation further
by adding a flushed out usage example based on a unix passwd file.
Lastly, clean up a few comments in the regression tests and pg_dump.h.
Buildfarm member tick identified an issue where the policies in the
relcache for a relation were were being replaced underneath a running
query, leading to segfaults while processing the policies to be added
to a query. Similar to how TupleDesc RuleLocks are handled, add in a
equalRSDesc() function to check if the policies have actually changed
and, if not, swap back the rsdesc field (using the original instead of
the temporairly built one; the whole structure is swapped and then
specific fields swapped back). This now passes a CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS
for me and should resolve the buildfarm error.
In addition to addressing this, add a new chapter in Data Definition
under Privileges which explains row security and provides examples of
its usage, change \d to always list policies (even if row security is
disabled- but note that it is disabled, or enabled with no policies),
rework check_role_for_policy (it really didn't need the entire policy,
but it did need to be using has_privs_of_role()), and change the field
in pg_class to relrowsecurity from relhasrowsecurity, based on
Heikki's suggestion. Also from Heikki, only issue SET ROW_SECURITY in
pg_restore when talking to a 9.5+ server, list Bypass RLS in \du, and
document --enable-row-security options for pg_dump and pg_restore.
Lastly, fix a number of minor whitespace and typo issues from Heikki,
Dimitri, add a missing #include, per Peter E, fix a few minor
variable-assigned-but-not-used and resource leak issues from Coverity
and add tab completion for role attribute bypassrls as well.
Building on the updatable security-barrier views work, add the
ability to define policies on tables to limit the set of rows
which are returned from a query and which are allowed to be added
to a table. Expressions defined by the policy for filtering are
added to the security barrier quals of the query, while expressions
defined to check records being added to a table are added to the
with-check options of the query.
New top-level commands are CREATE/ALTER/DROP POLICY and are
controlled by the table owner. Row Security is able to be enabled
and disabled by the owner on a per-table basis using
ALTER TABLE .. ENABLE/DISABLE ROW SECURITY.
Per discussion, ROW SECURITY is disabled on tables by default and
must be enabled for policies on the table to be used. If no
policies exist on a table with ROW SECURITY enabled, a default-deny
policy is used and no records will be visible.
By default, row security is applied at all times except for the
table owner and the superuser. A new GUC, row_security, is added
which can be set to ON, OFF, or FORCE. When set to FORCE, row
security will be applied even for the table owner and superusers.
When set to OFF, row security will be disabled when allowed and an
error will be thrown if the user does not have rights to bypass row
security.
Per discussion, pg_dump sets row_security = OFF by default to ensure
that exports and backups will have all data in the table or will
error if there are insufficient privileges to bypass row security.
A new option has been added to pg_dump, --enable-row-security, to
ask pg_dump to export with row security enabled.
A new role capability, BYPASSRLS, which can only be set by the
superuser, is added to allow other users to be able to bypass row
security using row_security = OFF.
Many thanks to the various individuals who have helped with the
design, particularly Robert Haas for his feedback.
Authors include Craig Ringer, KaiGai Kohei, Adam Brightwell, Dean
Rasheed, with additional changes and rework by me.
Reviewers have included all of the above, Greg Smith,
Jeff McCormick, and Robert Haas.
Peter Eisentraut
Stephen Frost
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Andres Freund
Alvaro Herrera
Robert Haas