Managing Roles and Privileges

The LightDB-A Database authorization mechanism stores roles and permissions to access database objects in the database and is administered using SQL statements or command-line utilities.

LightDB-A Database manages database access permissions using roles. The concept of roles subsumes the concepts of users and groups. A role can be a database user, a group, or both. Roles can own database objects (for example, tables) and can assign privileges on those objects to other roles to control access to the objects. Roles can be members of other roles, thus a member role can inherit the object privileges of its parent role.

Every LightDB-A Database system contains a set of database roles (users and groups). Those roles are separate from the users and groups managed by the operating system on which the server runs. However, for convenience you may want to maintain a relationship between operating system user names and LightDB-A Database role names, since many of the client applications use the current operating system user name as the default.

In LightDB-A Database, users log in and connect through the coordinator instance, which then verifies their role and access privileges. The coordinator then issues commands to the segment instances behind the scenes as the currently logged in role.

Roles are defined at the system level, meaning they are valid for all databases in the system.

In order to bootstrap the LightDB-A Database system, a freshly initialized system always contains one predefined superuser role (also referred to as the system user). This role will have the same name as the operating system user that initialized the LightDB-A Database system. Customarily, this role is named gpadmin. In order to create more roles you first have to connect as this initial role.

Parent topic: Managing LightDB-A Database Access

Security Best Practices for Roles and Privileges

• Secure the gpadmin system user. LightDB-A requires a UNIX user id to install and initialize the LightDB-A Database system. This system user is referred to as gpadmin in the LightDB-A documentation. This gpadmin user is the default database superuser in LightDB-A Database, as well as the file system owner of the LightDB-A installation and its underlying data files. This default administrator account is fundamental to the design of LightDB-A Database. The system cannot run without it, and there is no way to limit the access of this gpadmin user id. Use roles to manage who has access to the database for specific purposes. You should only use the gpadmin account for system maintenance tasks such as expansion and upgrade. Anyone who logs on to a LightDB-A host as this user id can read, alter or delete any data; including system catalog data and database access rights. Therefore, it is very important to secure the gpadmin user id and only provide access to essential system administrators. Administrators should only log in to LightDB-A as gpadmin when performing certain system maintenance tasks (such as upgrade or expansion). Database users should never log on as gpadmin, and ETL or production workloads should never run as gpadmin.
• Assign a distinct role to each user that logs in. For logging and auditing purposes, each user that is allowed to log in to LightDB-A Database should be given their own database role. For applications or web services, consider creating a distinct role for each application or service. See Creating New Roles (Users).
• Use groups to manage access privileges. See Role Membership.
• Limit users who have the SUPERUSER role attribute. Roles that are superusers bypass all access privilege checks in LightDB-A Database, as well as resource queuing. Only system administrators should be given superuser rights. See Altering Role Attributes.

Creating New Roles (Users)

A user-level role is considered to be a database role that can log in to the database and initiate a database session. Therefore, when you create a new user-level role using the CREATE ROLE command, you must specify the LOGIN privilege. For example:

=# CREATE ROLE jsmith WITH LOGIN;

A database role may have a number of attributes that define what sort of tasks that role can perform in the database. You can set these attributes when you create the role, or later using the ALTER ROLE command. See Table 1 for a description of the role attributes you can set.

Altering Role Attributes

A database role may have a number of attributes that define what sort of tasks that role can perform in the database.

You can set these attributes when you create the role, or later using the ALTER ROLE command. For example:

=# ALTER ROLE jsmith WITH PASSWORD 'passwd123';
=# ALTER ROLE admin VALID UNTIL 'infinity';
=# ALTER ROLE jsmith LOGIN;
=# ALTER ROLE jsmith RESOURCE QUEUE adhoc;
=# ALTER ROLE jsmith DENY DAY 'Sunday';

A role can also have role-specific defaults for many of the server configuration settings. For example, to set the default schema search path for a role:

=# ALTER ROLE admin SET search_path TO myschema, public;

Role Membership

It is frequently convenient to group users together to ease management of object privileges: that way, privileges can be granted to, or revoked from, a group as a whole. In LightDB-A Database this is done by creating a role that represents the group, and then granting membership in the group role to individual user roles.

Use the CREATE ROLE SQL command to create a new group role. For example:

=# CREATE ROLE admin CREATEROLE CREATEDB;

Once the group role exists, you can add and remove members (user roles) using the GRANT and REVOKE commands. For example:

=# GRANT admin TO john, sally;
=# REVOKE admin FROM bob;

For managing object privileges, you would then grant the appropriate permissions to the group-level role only (see Table 2). The member user roles then inherit the object privileges of the group role. For example:

=# GRANT ALL ON TABLE mytable TO admin;
=# GRANT ALL ON SCHEMA myschema TO admin;
=# GRANT ALL ON DATABASE mydb TO admin;

The role attributes LOGIN, SUPERUSER, CREATEDB, CREATEROLE, CREATEEXTTABLE, and RESOURCE QUEUE are never inherited as ordinary privileges on database objects are. User members must actually SET ROLE to a specific role having one of these attributes in order to make use of the attribute. In the above example, we gave CREATEDB and CREATEROLE to the admin role. If sally is a member of admin, then sally could issue the following command to assume the role attributes of the parent role:

=> SET ROLE admin;

Managing Object Privileges

When an object (table, view, sequence, database, function, language, schema, or tablespace) is created, it is assigned an owner. The owner is normally the role that ran the creation statement. For most kinds of objects, the initial state is that only the owner (or a superuser) can do anything with the object. To allow other roles to use it, privileges must be granted. LightDB-A Database supports the following privileges for each object type:

Note You must grant privileges for each object individually. For example, granting ALL on a database does not grant full access to the objects within that database. It only grants all of the database-level privileges (CONNECT, CREATE, TEMPORARY) to the database itself.

Use the GRANT SQL command to give a specified role privileges on an object. For example, to grant the role named jsmith insert privileges on the table named mytable:

=# GRANT INSERT ON mytable TO jsmith;

Similarly, to grant jsmith select privileges only to the column named col1 in the table named table2:

=# GRANT SELECT (col1) on TABLE table2 TO jsmith;

To revoke privileges, use the REVOKE command. For example:

=# REVOKE ALL PRIVILEGES ON mytable FROM jsmith;

You can also use the DROP OWNED and REASSIGN OWNED commands for managing objects owned by deprecated roles (Note: only an object’s owner or a superuser can drop an object or reassign ownership). For example:

=# REASSIGN OWNED BY sally TO bob;
=# DROP OWNED BY visitor;

Encrypting Data

LightDB-A Database is installed with an optional module of encryption/decryption functions called pgcrypto. The pgcrypto functions allow database administrators to store certain columns of data in encrypted form. This adds an extra layer of protection for sensitive data, as data stored in LightDB-A Database in encrypted form cannot be read by anyone who does not have the encryption key, nor can it be read directly from the disks.

Note The pgcrypto functions run inside the database server, which means that all the data and passwords move between pgcrypto and the client application in clear-text. For optimal security, consider also using SSL connections between the client and the LightDB-A coordinator server.

To use pgcrypto functions, register the pgcrypto extension in each database in which you want to use the functions. For example:

$ psql -d testdb -c "CREATE EXTENSION pgcrypto"

See pgcrypto in the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about individual functions.

Protecting Passwords in LightDB-A Database

In its default configuration, LightDB-A Database saves MD5 hashes of login users’ passwords in the pg_authid system catalog rather than saving clear text passwords. Anyone who is able to view the pg_authid table can see hash strings, but no passwords. This also ensures that passwords are obscured when the database is dumped to backup files.

The hash function runs when the password is set by using any of the following commands:

• CREATE USER name WITH ENCRYPTED PASSWORD 'password'
• CREATE ROLE name WITH LOGIN ENCRYPTED PASSWORD 'password'
• ALTER USER name WITH ENCRYPTED PASSWORD 'password'
• ALTER ROLE name WITH ENCRYPTED PASSWORD 'password'

The ENCRYPTED keyword may be omitted when the password_encryption system configuration parameter is on, which is the default value. The password_encryption configuration parameter determines whether clear text or hashed passwords are saved when the ENCRYPTED or UNENCRYPTED keyword is not present in the command.

Note The SQL command syntax and password_encryption configuration variable include the term encrypt, but the passwords are not technically encrypted. They are hashed and therefore cannot be decrypted.

The hash is calculated on the concatenated clear text password and role name. The MD5 hash produces a 32-byte hexadecimal string prefixed with the characters md5. The hashed password is saved in the rolpassword column of the pg_authid system table.

Although it is not recommended, passwords may be saved in clear text in the database by including the UNENCRYPTED keyword in the command or by setting the password_encryption configuration variable to off. Note that changing the configuration value has no effect on existing passwords, only newly created or updated passwords.

To set password_encryption globally, run these commands in a shell as the gpadmin user:

$ gpconfig -c password_encryption -v 'off'
$ gpstop -u

To set password_encryption in a session, use the SQL SET command:

=# SET password_encryption = 'on';

Time-based Authentication

LightDB-A Database enables the administrator to restrict access to certain times by role. Use the CREATE ROLE or ALTER ROLE commands to specify time-based constraints.

For details, refer to the LightDB-A Database Security Configuration Guide.