Re: CREATE ROLE bug?

On Wed, Jan 25, 2023 at 9:35 AM Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> So, how would someone with CREATEROLE permission add people to their own
> role, without superuser permission? Are we adding any security by
> preventing this?

They can't, because a role can't ever have ADMIN OPTION on itself, and
you need ADMIN OPTION on a role to confer membership in that role.

The security argument here is complicated, but I think it basically
boils down to wanting to distinguish between accessing the permissions
of a role and administering the role, or in other words, being a
member of a role is supposed to be different than having ADMIN OPTION
on it. Probably for that reason, we've never allowed making a role a
member of itself. In any release, this fails:

rhaas=# grant bruce to bruce with admin option;
ERROR: role "bruce" is a member of role "bruce"

If that worked, then role "bruce" would be able to grant membership in
role "bruce" to anyone -- but all those people wouldn't just get
membership, they'd get ADMIN OPTION, too, because *bruce* has ADMIN
OPTION on himself and anyone to whom he grants access to his role will
therefore get admin option too. Someone might argue that this is OK,
but our precedent is otherwise. It used to be the case that the users
implicitly enjoyed ADMIN OPTION on their own roles and thus could do
the sort of thing that you were proposing. That led to CVE-2014-0060
and commit fea164a72a7bfd50d77ba5fb418d357f8f2bb7d0. That CVE is, as I
understand it, all about maintaining the distinction between
membership and ADMIN OPTION. In other words, we've made an intentional
decision to not let ordinary users do the sort of thing you tried to
do here.

So the only reason your example ever worked is because the "service"
role had CREATEROLE, and thus, in earlier releases, got to bypass all
the permissions checks. But it turns out that letting CREATEROLE
bypass all the permissions checks is *also* a big security problem, so
that is now restricted as well.

I don't want to take the position that we couldn't find some way to
allow ordinary users to do this. I think that the desire to maintain
the distinction between membership and ADMIN OPTION makes sense as a
general rule, but if somebody wants to abolish it in a particular case
by making strange grants, would that really be that bad? I'm not
totally convinced that it would be. It probably depends somewhat on
how much you want to try to keep people from accidentally giving away
more privileges than they intended, and also on whether you think that
this is a useful thing for someone to be able to do in the first
place. However, it's the way we've designed the system and we've even
requested CVEs when we accidentally did something inconsistent with
that general principle. Similarly, I don't want to take the position
that the restrictions I put on CREATEROLE are the *only* way that we
could have plugged the security holes that it has had for years now. I
think they are pretty sensible and pretty consistent with the overall
system design, but somebody else might have been able to come up with
some other set of restrictions that allowed this case to work.

I think David is right to raise the question of how useful it would be
to allow this case. In general, I think that if role A creates role B,
it is more sensible to grant B's permissions to A than to grant A's
permissions to B. The former is useful because it permits the more
powerful user to act on behalf of the less powerful user, just as the
superuser is able to administer the whole system by being able to act
on behalf of any other user. But the latter makes you wonder why you
are even bothering to have two users, because you end up with A and B
having exactly identical privileges. That's a bit of a strange thing
to want, but if you do happen to want it, you can get it with this new
system: again, as David says, you should just create one role to use
as a group, and then grant membership in that group to multiple roles
that are used as users.

But it does seem pretty important to keep talking about these things,
because there's definitely no guarantee whatsoever that all of the
commits I've made to master in this area are without problems. If we
find important cases that can't be supported given the new
restrictions on CREATEROLE, or even important cases that never worked
but we wish they did, well then we should think about what to change.
I'm not too concerned about this particular case not working, but the
next one might be different.

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