Re: postgres_fdw, dblink, and CREATE SUBSCRIPTION security

On Mon, Jan 30, 2023 at 4:12 PM Jacob Champion <jchampion@timescale.com> wrote:
> For our case, assuming that connections have side effects, one
> solution could be for the client to signal to the server that the
> connection should use in-band authentication only; i.e. fail the
> connection if the credentials provided aren't good enough by
> themselves to authenticate the client. (This has some overlap with
> SASL negotiation, maybe.)

I'm not an expert on this stuff, but to me that feels like a weak and
fuzzy concept. If the client is going to tell the server something,
I'd much rather have it say something like "i'm proxying a request
from my local user rhaas, who authenticated using such and such a
method and connected from such and such an IP yadda yadda". That feels
to me like really clear communication that the server can then be
configured to something about via pg_hba.conf or similar. Saying "use
in-band authentication only", to me, feels much murkier. As the
recipient of that message, I don't know exactly what to do about it,
and it feels like whatever heuristic I adopt might end up being wrong
and something bad happens anyway.

> I agree. (But for the record, I think that an outbound proxy filter is
> also insufficient. Someone, somewhere, is going to want to safely
> proxy through localhost _and_ have peer authentication set up.)

Well then they're indeed going to need some way to distinguish a
proxied connection from a non-proxied one. You can't send identical
connection requests in different scenarios and get different
results....

> I guess I didn't call it out explicitly, so it was fair to assume that
> it did not. I don't think we should ignore those cases.

OK, cool.

> But if we let the configuration focus on policies instead, and
> simultaneously improve the confused-deputy problem, then any IP/host
> filter functionality that we provide becomes an additional safety
> measure instead of your only viable line of defense. "I screwed up our
> IP filter, but we're still safe because the proxy refused to forward
> its client cert to the backend." Or, "this other local application
> requires peer authentication, but it's okay because the proxy
> disallows those connections by default."

Defense in depth is good.

> > Your idea
> > seems to rely on us being able to identify all of the policies that a
> > user is likely to want and give names to each one, and I don't feel
> > very confident that that's realistic. But maybe I'm misinterpreting
> > your idea?
>
> No, that's pretty accurate. But I'm used to systems that provide a
> ridiculous number of policies [1, 2] via what's basically a scoped
> property bag. "Turn off option 1 and 2 globally. For host A and IP
> address B, turn on option 1 as an exception." And I don't really
> expect us to need as many options as those systems do.
>
> I think that configuration style evolves well, it focuses on the right
> things, and it can still handle IP lists intuitively [3], if that's
> the way a DBA really wants to set up policies.

I think what we really need here is an example or three of a proposed
configuration file syntax. I think it would be good if we could pick a
syntax that doesn't require a super-complicated parser, and that maybe
has something in common with our existing configuration file syntaxes.
But if we have to invent something new, then we can do that.

-- 
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com