Re: Non-superuser subscription owners

From: Mark Dilger <mark(dot)dilger(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>
Cc: Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de>, Jeff Davis <pgsql(at)j-davis(dot)com>, Amit Kapila <amit(dot)kapila16(at)gmail(dot)com>, Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Non-superuser subscription owners
Date: 2023-01-30 18:46:07
Message-ID: 910FF284-1B95-4C0F-B661-A9A0206DA6F0@enterprisedb.com
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> On Jan 30, 2023, at 9:26 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> First, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to have one person
> managing the publications and someone else managing the subscriptions,
> and especially if those parties are mutually untrusting. I can't think
> of any real reason to set things up that way. Sure, you could, but why
> would you? You could, equally, decide that one member of your
> household was going to decide what's for dinner every night, and some
> other member of your household was going to decide what gets purchased
> at the grocery store each week. If those two people exercise their
> responsibilities without tight coordination, or with hostile intent
> toward each other, things are going to go badly, but that's not an
> argument for putting a combination lock on the flour canister. It's an
> argument for getting along better, or not having such a dumb system in
> the first place. I don't quite see how the situation you postulate in
> (A) and (B) is any different. Publications and subscriptions are as
> closely connected as food purchases and meals. The point of a
> publication is for it to connect up to a subscription.

I have a grim view of the requirement that publishers and subscribers trust each other. Even when they do trust each other, they can firewall attacks by acting as if they do not.

> In what
> circumstances would be it be reasonable to give responsibility for
> those objects to different and especially mutually untrusting users?

When public repositories of data, such as the IANA whois database, publish their data via postgres publications.


Mark Dilger
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

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