Role option management was changed in Postgres 16. This patch improves
the docs around these changes, including CREATE ROLE's INHERIT option,
inheritance handling, and grant's ability to change role options.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/Zab9GiV63EENDcWG@momjian.us
Co-authored-by: David G. Johnston
Backpatch-through: 16
Previously, a CREATEROLE user without SUPERUSER could not alter
REPLICATION users in any way, and could not set the BYPASSRLS
attribute. However, they could manipulate the CREATEDB property
even if they themselves did not possess it.
With this change, a CREATEROLE user without SUPERUSER can set or
clear the REPLICATION, BYPASSRLS, or CREATEDB property on a new
role or a role that they have rights to manage if and only if
that property is set for their own role.
This implements the standard idea that you can't give permissions
you don't have (but you can give the ones you do have). We might
in the future want to provide more powerful ways to constrain
what a CREATEROLE user can do - for example, to limit whether
CONNECTION LIMIT can be set or the values to which it can be set -
but that is left as future work.
Patch by me, reviewed by Nathan Bossart, Tushar Ahuja, and Neha
Sharma.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmobX=LHg_J5aT=0pi9gJy=JdtrUVGAu0zhr-i5v5nNbJDg@mail.gmail.com
Can be set to the empty string, or to either or both of "set" or
"inherit". If set to a non-empty value, a non-superuser who creates
a role (necessarily by relying up the CREATEROLE privilege) will
grant that role back to themselves with the specified options.
This isn't a security feature, because the grant that this feature
triggers can also be performed explicitly. Instead, it's a user experience
feature. A superuser would necessarily inherit the privileges of any
created role and be able to access all such roles via SET ROLE;
with this patch, you can configure createrole_self_grant = 'set, inherit'
to provide a similar experience for a user who has CREATEROLE but not
SUPERUSER.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmobN59ct+Emmz6ig1Nua2Q-_o=r6DSD98KfU53kctq_kQw@mail.gmail.com
Previously, CREATEROLE users were permitted to make nearly arbitrary
changes to roles that they didn't create, with certain exceptions,
particularly superuser roles. Instead, allow CREATEROLE users to make such
changes to roles for which they possess ADMIN OPTION, and to
grant membership only in roles for which they possess ADMIN OPTION.
When a CREATEROLE user who is not a superuser creates a role, grant
ADMIN OPTION on the newly-created role to the creator, so that they
can administer roles they create or for which they have been given
privileges.
With these changes, CREATEROLE users still have very significant
powers that unprivileged users do not receive: they can alter, rename,
drop, comment on, change the password for, and change security labels
on roles. However, they can now do these things only for roles for
which they possess appropriate privileges, rather than all
non-superuser roles; moreover, they cannot grant a role such as
pg_execute_server_program unless they themselves possess it.
Patch by me, reviewed by Mark Dilger.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmobN59ct+Emmz6ig1Nua2Q-_o=r6DSD98KfU53kctq_kQw@mail.gmail.com
In user-manag.sgml, document precisely what privileges are conveyed
by CREATEROLE. Make particular note of the fact that it allows
changing passwords and granting access to high-privilege roles.
Also remove the suggestion of using a user with CREATEROLE and
CREATEDB instead of a superuser, as there is no real security
advantage to this approach.
Elsewhere in the documentation, adjust text that suggests that
<literal>CREATEROLE</literal> only allows for role creation, and
refer to the documentation in user-manag.sgml as appropriate.
Patch by me, reviewed by Álvaro Herrera
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoZBsPL8nPhvYecx7iGo5qpDRqa9k_AcaW1SbOjugAY1Ag@mail.gmail.com
The GRANT statement can now specify WITH INHERIT TRUE or WITH
INHERIT FALSE to control whether the member inherits the granted
role's permissions. For symmetry, you can now likewise write
WITH ADMIN TRUE or WITH ADMIN FALSE to turn ADMIN OPTION on or off.
If a GRANT does not specify WITH INHERIT, the behavior based on
whether the member role is marked INHERIT or NOINHERIT. This means
that if all roles are marked INHERIT or NOINHERIT before any role
grants are performed, the behavior is identical to what we had before;
otherwise, it's different, because ALTER ROLE [NO]INHERIT now only
changes the default behavior of future grants, and has no effect on
existing ones.
Patch by me. Reviewed and testing by Nathan Bossart and Tushar Ahuja,
with design-level comments from various others.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+Tgmoa5Sf4PiWrfxA=sGzDKg0Ojo3dADw=wAHOhR9dggV=RmQ@mail.gmail.com
We italicized some, but not all, instances of "per se", "pro forma", and
"ad hoc". These phrases are widespread in formal registers of English,
so it"s debatable whether they even qualify as foreign. We could instead
try to be more consistent in the use of <foreignphrase>, but that"s
difficult to enforce, so let"s just remove the tags for those words.
The one case that seems to deserve the tag is "voilà". Instead of keeping
just one instance of the tag, change that to a more standard phrase.
John Naylor
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAFBsxsHtWs_NsccAVgQ=tTUKkXHpHdkjZXtp_Cd9dGWyBDxfbQ@mail.gmail.com
The intention in commit 491c029db was to require superuserness to
change the BYPASSRLS property, but the actual effect of the coding
in AlterRole() was to require superuserness to change anything at all
about a BYPASSRLS role. Other properties of a BYPASSRLS role should
be changeable under the same rules as for a normal role, though.
Fix that, and also take care of some documentation omissions related
to BYPASSRLS and REPLICATION role properties.
Tom Lane and Stephen Frost, per bug report from Wolfgang Walther.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/a5548a9f-89ee-3167-129d-162b5985fcf8@technowledgy.de
SQL commands are generally marked up as <command>, except when a link
to a reference page is used using <xref>. But the latter doesn't
create monospace markup, so this looks strange especially when a
paragraph contains a mix of links and non-links.
We considered putting <command> in the <refentrytitle> on the target
side, but that creates some formatting side effects elsewhere.
Generally, it seems safer to solve this on the link source side.
We can't put the <xref> inside the <command>; the DTD doesn't allow
this. DocBook 5 would allow the <command> to have the linkend
attribute itself, but we are not there yet.
So to solve this for now, convert the <xref>s to <link> plus
<command>. This gives the correct look and also gives some more
flexibility what we can put into the link text (e.g., subcommands or
other clauses). In the future, these could then be converted to
DocBook 5 style.
I haven't converted absolutely all xrefs to SQL command reference
pages, only those where we care about the appearance of the link text
or where it was otherwise appropriate to make the appearance match a
bit better. Also in some cases, the links where repetitive, so in
those cases the links where just removed and replaced by a plain
<command>. In cases where we just want the link and don't
specifically care about the generated link text (typically phrased
"for further information see <xref ...>") the xref is kept.
Reported-by: Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker <ilmari@ilmari.org>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/87o8pco34z.fsf@wibble.ilmari.org
CREATE GROUP is an exact alias for CREATE ROLE, and CREATE USER is
almost an exact alias, as can easily be confirmed by checking the
code. So the man page syntax descriptions ought to match up. The
last few additions of role options seem to have forgotten to update
create_group.sgml, though. Fix that, and add a naggy reminder to
create_role.sgml in hopes of not forgetting again.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/158647836143.655.9853963229391401576@wrigleys.postgresql.org
The documentation of CREATE/ALTER ROLE has been missing two things
related to PASSWORD:
- The password value provided needs to be quoted, some places of the
documentation marked the field with quotes, but not others, which led to
confusion.
- PASSWORD NULL was not provided consistently, with ENCRYPTED being not
compatible with it.
Reported-by: Steven Winfield
Author: Michael Paquier
Reviewed-by: David G. Johnston
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/154282901979.1316.7418475422120496802@wrigleys.postgresql.org
Since some preparation work had already been done, the only source
changes left were changing empty-element tags like <xref linkend="foo">
to <xref linkend="foo"/>, and changing the DOCTYPE.
The source files are still named *.sgml, but they are actually XML files
now. Renaming could be considered later.
In the build system, the intermediate step to convert from SGML to XML
is removed. Everything is build straight from the source files again.
The OpenSP (or the old SP) package is no longer needed.
The documentation toolchain instructions are updated and are much
simpler now.
Peter Eisentraut, Alexander Lakhin, Jürgen Purtz
IDs in SGML are case insensitive, and we have accumulated a mix of upper
and lower case IDs, including different variants of the same ID. In
XML, these will be case sensitive, so we need to fix up those
differences. Going to all lower case seems most straightforward, and
the current build process already makes all anchors and lower case
anyway during the SGML->XML conversion, so this doesn't create any
difference in the output right now. A future XML-only build process
would, however, maintain any mixed case ID spellings in the output, so
that is another reason to clean this up beforehand.
Author: Alexander Lakhin <exclusion@gmail.com>
For DocBook XML compatibility, don't use SGML empty tags (</>) anymore,
replace by the full tag name. Add a warning option to catch future
occurrences.
Alexander Lakhin, Jürgen Purtz
Since PostgreSQL 9.6, rolreplication no longer determines whether a role
can run pg_start_backup() and pg_stop_backup(), so remove that.
Add that this attribute determines whether a role can create and drop
replication slots.
Reported-by: Fujii Masao <masao.fujii@gmail.com>
Some authentication methods allowed it, others did not. In the client-side,
libpq does not even try to authenticate with an empty password, which makes
using empty passwords hazardous: an administrator might think that an
account with an empty password cannot be used to log in, because psql
doesn't allow it, and not realize that a different client would in fact
allow it. To clear that confusion and to be be consistent, disallow empty
passwords in all authentication methods.
All the authentication methods that used plaintext authentication over the
wire, except for BSD authentication, already checked that the password
received from the user was not empty. To avoid forgetting it in the future
again, move the check to the recv_password_packet function. That only
forbids using an empty password with plaintext authentication, however.
MD5 and SCRAM need a different fix:
* In stable branches, check that the MD5 hash stored for the user does not
not correspond to an empty string. This adds some overhead to MD5
authentication, because the server needs to compute an extra MD5 hash, but
it is not noticeable in practice.
* In HEAD, modify CREATE and ALTER ROLE to clear the password if an empty
string, or a password hash that corresponds to an empty string, is
specified. The user-visible behavior is the same as in the stable branches,
the user cannot log in, but it seems better to stop the empty password from
entering the system in the first place. Secondly, it is fairly expensive to
check that a SCRAM hash doesn't correspond to an empty string, because
computing a SCRAM hash is much more expensive than an MD5 hash by design,
so better avoid doing that on every authentication.
We could clear the password on CREATE/ALTER ROLE also in stable branches,
but we would still need to check at authentication time, because even if we
prevent empty passwords from being stored in pg_authid, there might be
existing ones there already.
Reported by Jeroen van der Ham, Ben de Graaff and Jelte Fennema.
Security: CVE-2017-7546
Storing passwords in plaintext hasn't been a good idea for a very long
time, if ever. Now seems like a good time to finally forbid it, since we're
messing with this in PostgreSQL 10 anyway.
Remove the CREATE/ALTER USER UNENCRYPTED PASSSWORD 'foo' syntax, since
storing passwords unencrypted is no longer supported. ENCRYPTED PASSWORD
'foo' is still accepted, but ENCRYPTED is now just a noise-word, it does
the same as just PASSWORD 'foo'.
Likewise, remove the --unencrypted option from createuser, but accept
--encrypted as a no-op for backward compatibility. AFAICS, --encrypted was
a no-op even before this patch, because createuser encrypted the password
before sending it to the server even if --encrypted was not specified. It
added the ENCRYPTED keyword to the SQL command, but since the password was
already in encrypted form, it didn't make any difference. The documentation
was not clear on whether that was intended or not, but it's moot now.
Also, while password_encryption='on' is still accepted as an alias for
'md5', it is now marked as hidden, so that it is not listed as an accepted
value in error hints, for example. That's not directly related to removing
'plain', but it seems better this way.
Reviewed by Michael Paquier
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/16e9b768-fd78-0b12-cfc1-7b6b7f238fde@iki.fi
This introduces a new generic SASL authentication method, similar to the
GSS and SSPI methods. The server first tells the client which SASL
authentication mechanism to use, and then the mechanism-specific SASL
messages are exchanged in AuthenticationSASLcontinue and PasswordMessage
messages. Only SCRAM-SHA-256 is supported at the moment, but this allows
adding more SASL mechanisms in the future, without changing the overall
protocol.
Support for channel binding, aka SCRAM-SHA-256-PLUS is left for later.
The SASLPrep algorithm, for pre-processing the password, is not yet
implemented. That could cause trouble, if you use a password with
non-ASCII characters, and a client library that does implement SASLprep.
That will hopefully be added later.
Authorization identities, as specified in the SCRAM-SHA-256 specification,
are ignored. SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION provides more or less the same
functionality, anyway.
If a user doesn't exist, perform a "mock" authentication, by constructing
an authentic-looking challenge on the fly. The challenge is derived from
a new system-wide random value, "mock authentication nonce", which is
created at initdb, and stored in the control file. We go through these
motions, in order to not give away the information on whether the user
exists, to unauthenticated users.
Bumps PG_CONTROL_VERSION, because of the new field in control file.
Patch by Michael Paquier and Heikki Linnakangas, reviewed at different
stages by Robert Haas, Stephen Frost, David Steele, Aleksander Alekseev,
and many others.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqRbR3GmFYdedCAhzukfKrgBLTLtMvENOmPrVWREsZkF8g%40mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqSMXU35g%3DW9X74HVeQp0uvgJxvYOuA4A-A3M%2B0wfEBv-w%40mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/55192AFE.6080106@iki.fi
Doing so doesn't seem to be within the purpose of the per user
connection limits, and has particularly unfortunate effects in
conjunction with parallel queries.
Backpatch to 9.6 where parallel queries were introduced.
David Rowley, reviewed by Robert Haas and Albe Laurenz.
That was written when we still had "crypt" authentication, and it was
referring to the fact that an older client might support "crypt"
authentication but not "md5". But we haven't supported "crypt" for years.
(As soon as we add a new authentication mechanism that doesn't work with
MD5 hashes, we'll need a similar notice again. But this text as it's worded
now is just wrong.)
Backpatch to all supported versions.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/9a7263eb-0980-2072-4424-440bb2513dc7@iki.fi
Once upon a time we did not have a separate CREATEROLE privilege, and
CREATEUSER effectively meant SUPERUSER. When we invented CREATEROLE
(in 8.1) we also added SUPERUSER so as to have a less confusing keyword
for this role property. However, we left CREATEUSER in place as a
deprecated synonym for SUPERUSER, because of backwards-compatibility
concerns. It's still there and is still confusing people, as for example
in bug #13694 from Justin Catterson. 9.6 will be ten years or so later,
which surely ought to be long enough to end the deprecation and just
remove these old keywords. Hence, do so.
Specifically, make its effect independent from the row_security GUC, and
make it affect permission checks pertinent to views the BYPASSRLS role
owns. The row_security GUC thereby ceases to change successful-query
behavior; it can only make a query fail with an error. Back-patch to
9.5, where BYPASSRLS was introduced.
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.
DocBook XML is superficially compatible with DocBook SGML but has a
slightly stricter DTD that we have been violating in a few cases.
Although XSLT doesn't care whether the document is valid, the style
sheets don't necessarily process invalid documents correctly, so we need
to work toward fixing this.
This first commit moves the indexterms in refentry elements to an
allowed position. It has no impact on the output.
superuser doesn't have doesn't make much sense, as a superuser can do
whatever he wants through other means, anyway. So instead of granting
replication privilege to superusers in CREATE USER time by default, allow
replication connection from superusers whether or not they have the
replication privilege.
Patch by Noah Misch, per discussion on bug report #6264
This might help to avoid confusion between the CREATE USER command,
and the deprecated CREATEUSER option to CREATE ROLE, as per a recent
complaint from Ron Adams. At any rate, having a cross-link here
seems like a good idea; two commands that are so similar should
reference each other.
There is what may actually be a mistake in our markup. The problem is
in a situation like
<para>
<command>FOO</command> is ...
there is strictly speaking a line break before "FOO". In the HTML
output, this does not appear to be a problem, but in the man page
output, this shows up, so you get double blank lines at odd places.
So far, we have attempted to work around this with an XSL hack, but
that causes other problems, such as creating run-ins in places like
<acronym>SQL</acronym> <command>COPY</command>
So fix the problem properly by removing the extra whitespace. I only
fixed the problems that affect the man page output, not all the
places.
This can be overriden by using NOREPLICATION on the CREATE ROLE
statement, but by default they will have it, making it backwards
compatible and "less surprising" (given that superusers normally
override all checks).
This privilege is required to do Streaming Replication, instead of
superuser, making it possible to set up a SR slave that doesn't
have write permissions on the master.
Superuser privileges do NOT override this check, so in order to
use the default superuser account for replication it must be
explicitly granted the REPLICATION permissions. This is backwards
incompatible change, in the interest of higher default security.
The endterm attribute is mainly useful when the toolchain does not support
automatic link target text generation for a particular situation. In the
past, this was required by the man page tools for all reference page links,
but that is no longer the case, and it now actually gets in the way of
proper automatic link text generation. The only remaining use cases are
currently xrefs to refsects.
Instead of requiring translators to translate the entire SQL command
synopses, change create_help.pl to only require them to translate the
placeholders, and paste those into the synopsis using a printf mechanism.
Make some small updates to the markup to make it easier to parse.
Note: This causes msgmerge of gettext 0.17 to segfault. You will need
the patch from https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?27474 to make it work.
msgmerge usually only runs on babel.postgresql.org, however.
another section if required by the platform (instead of the old way of
building them in section "l" and always transforming them to the
platform-specific section).
This speeds up the installation on common platforms, and it avoids some
funny business with the man page tools and build process.
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
Bruce Momjian
Heikki Linnakangas
Robert Haas
Tom Lane
Peter Eisentraut
Michael Paquier
Peter Eisentraut
Andrew Dunstan
Noah Misch
Stephen Frost
Magnus Hagander
Neil Conway