* Jim Nasby (Jim.Nasby@BlueTreble.com) wrote:
> On 1/20/15 9:01 PM, Stephen Frost wrote:
> >* Jim Nasby (Jim.Nasby@BlueTreble.com) wrote:
> >>>+1. In particular I'm very concerned with the idea of doing this via roles, because that would make it trivial for
anysuperuser to disable auditing. The only good option I could see to provide this kind of flexibility would be
allowingthe user to provide a function that accepts role, object, etc and make return a boolean. The performance of
thatwould presumably suck with anything but a C function, but we could provide some C functions to handle simple cases.
> >Superusers will be able to bypass, trivially, anything that's done in
> >the process space of PG. The only possible exception to that being an
> >SELinux or similar solution, but I don't think that's what you were
> >getting at.
>
> Not if the GUC was startup-only. That would allow someone with OS access to the server to prevent a Postgres
superuserfrom disabling it.
That is not accurate.
Being startup-only won't help if the user is a superuser.
> >I certainly don't think having the user provide a C function to specify
> >what should be audited as making any sense- if they can do that, they
> >can use the same hooks pgaudit is using and skip the middle-man. As for
> >the performance concern you raise, I actually don't buy into it at all.
> >It's not like we worry about the performance of checking permissions on
> >objects in general and, for my part, I like to think that's because it's
> >pretty darn quick already.
>
> I was only mentioning C because of performance concerns. If SQL or plpgsql is fast enough then there's no need.
If this is being done for every execution of a query then I agree- SQL
or plpgsql probably wouldn't be fast enough. That doesn't mean it makes
sense to have pgaudit support calling a C function, it simply means that
we need to find another way to configure auditing (which is what I think
I've done...).
Thanks,
Stephen