Re: New SET privilege for pg_has_role() in v16+

On Tue, Jan 2, 2024 at 5:11 PM David G. Johnston <david(dot)g(dot)johnston(at)gmail(dot)com>
wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 2, 2024 at 8:25 AM Dominique Devienne <ddevienne(at)gmail(dot)com>
> wrote:
>
>> pg_has_role() from
>> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/functions-info.html
>> added the 'SET' privilege in v16, and on top of the existing 'MEMBER' and
>> 'USAGE' ones:
>>
>

> Membership no longer does anything by itself.
>

OK! That's news to me, I must go back to the v16 (?) release notes and
learn more about this.

> Both inherit and set capabilities are now individually controlled
> permissions related to membership.
>

Hmmm, what drove this change? (I guess I'm getting back to the rationale
from earlier).
The previous model was not granular enough?
And the new one is as granular as it gets?

It is indeed possible, but not useful, to grant membership but then
> disallow both set and inherit permissions.
>

OK. Yet another thing I'll need to study.

As I wrote earlier, we use ROLEs extensively, some INHERIT and others NOT
INHERIT,
to map an existing C/C++ enforce security model in mid-tier services, to a
ROLE/GRANT-based
one enforced by PostgreSQL itself, thus understanding why these changes
were made in v16 matters to me a lot.

Thanks, --DD