PostgreSQL offers powerful means to create users/ roles and enables administrators to implement everything from simple to really complex security concepts. However, if the PostgreSQL security machinery is not used wisely, things might become a bit rough.
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This fairly short post will try to shed some light on this topic.
The most important thing you must remember is the following: You cannot drop a user unless there are no more permissions, objects, policies, tablespaces, etc. are assigned to it. Here's an example how to create users:
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test=# CREATE TABLE a (aid int); CREATE TABLE test=# CREATE USER joe; CREATE ROLE test=# GRANT SELECT ON a TO joe; GRANT |
As you can see “joe” has a single permission and there is no way to kill the user without revoking the permission first:
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test=# DROP USER joe; ERROR: role 'joe' cannot be dropped because some objects depend on it DETAIL: privileges for table a |
Note that there is no such thing as “DROP USER … CASCADE” - it does not exist. The reason for that is that users are created at the instance level. A user can therefore have rights in potentially dozens of PostgreSQL databases. If you drop a user you cannot just blindly remove objects from other databases. It is therefore necessary to revoke all permissions first before a user can be removed. That can be a real issue if your deployments grow in size.
One thing we have seen over the years is: Tasks tend to exist longer than staff. Even after hiring and firing cleaning staff for your office 5 times the task is still the same: Somebody is going to clean your office twice a week. It can therefore make sense to abstract the tasks performed by “cleaning_staff” in a role, which is then assigned to individual people.
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test=# CREATE ROLE cleaning_staff NOLOGIN; CREATE ROLE test=# GRANT SELECT ON a TO cleaning_staff; GRANT test=# GRANT cleaning_staff TO joe; GRANT ROLE |
First we create a role called “cleaning_staff” and assign whatever permissions to that role. In the next step the role is assigned to “joe” to make sure that joe has all the permissions a typical cleaning person usually has. If only roles are assigned to real people such as joe, it is a lot easier to remove those people from the system again.
If you want to take a look at how permissions are set on your system, consider checking out pg_permission, which is available for free on our GitHub page: https://github.com/cybertec-postgresql/pg_permission
Just do a …
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SELECT * FROM all_permissions; |
… and filter for the desired role. You can then see at a glance which permissions are set at the moment. You can also run UPDATE on this view and PostgreSQL will automatically generate the necessary GRANT / REVOKE commands to adjust the underlying ACLs.
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One important thing to note, in my opinion, and that is not well documented, is that GRANT on roles works like creating a role with the INHERIT IN ROLE options, that is there is no need to SET ROLE to gain privileges.
A useful tip to inspect what abstract roles a user has available:
SELECT * FROM information_schema.applicable_roles WHERE grantee = session_user;or if using "psql" simply:
du $myuser