Another user complaint regarding visibility of pg_catalog data

On Tue, Nov 7, 2023 at 12:28 PM David G. Johnston <
david.g.johnston@gmail.com> wrote:

Is this something we just don't want to go into detail within our
documentation, or just no one has cared enough to write something up
(beyond my first draft back then) and form it into a patch?

I've gone and added an FAQ entry for this at least so I can post a link to
that in the future.

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/FAQ#How_do_I_prevent_regular_users_from_seeing_my_trade_secrets.3F

I'm not married to the title or content but wanted to get something out
there while my mind was engaged on the topic.

David J.

On Tue, 2023-11-07 at 12:28 -0700, David G. Johnston wrote:

This comes up every so often (including today on Discord) and I keep having trouble
figuring out where to point people for our official assertion and explanation
for why anyone with a login can view routine bodies, view specifications, and comments.

Is this something we just don't want to go into detail within our documentation,
or just no one has cared enough to write something up (beyond my first draft back
then) and form it into a patch?

I am not sure if we can and want to document the "why" (this does not really belong
into the technical documentation), but the fact that most catalog tables can be read
by PUBLIC is worth documenting.

Perhaps here: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/catalogs.html

When people ask my "why?", I tend to answer "why not?". It is not a security
problem, in my opinion. Every user is allowed to know that I have a table
"purchase" with a column "credit_card_nr". As long as the permissions are set
correctly, that is no problem. Any attempt to hide that information is at best
"security by obscurity".

Yours,
Laurenz Albe

On Wednesday, November 8, 2023, Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at>
wrote:

When people ask my "why?", I tend to answer "why not?". It is not a
security
problem, in my opinion. Every user is allowed to know that I have a table
"purchase" with a column "credit_card_nr". As long as the permissions are
set
correctly, that is no problem. Any attempt to hide that information is at
best
"security by obscurity".

The typical answer is some variant of trade secrets. Though wanting to
store private info in a comment has some merit too.

David J.

On Wed, 2023-11-08 at 05:31 -0700, David G. Johnston wrote:

On Wednesday, November 8, 2023, Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at> wrote:

When people ask my "why?", I tend to answer "why not?".  It is not a security
problem, in my opinion.  Every user is allowed to know that I have a table
"purchase" with a column "credit_card_nr".  As long as the permissions are set
correctly, that is no problem.  Any attempt to hide that information is at best
"security by obscurity".

The typical answer is some variant of trade secrets.  Though wanting to store
private info in a comment has some merit too.

Don't keep your trade secrets in database identifiers or database function code.

But if somebody is nervous about that, they can have their own database.
Why share a database with users you don't trust?

Yours,
Laurenz Albe