On Tue, Feb 28, 2017 at 12:07 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> writes: > We changed Postgres 9.6 to allow open group permissions on the > _server_'s SSL key if it was owned by root: > Allow the server's <acronym>SSL</> key file to have group read > access if it is owned by <literal>root</> (Christoph Berg) > Is this something we should change on the client? I don't see why not, > but the 'root' requirement would still remain.
I'm pretty suspicious of doing this on the client side. It doesn't seem as useful, and it would open up a bunch of issues concerning e.g. what cert authentication actually is authenticating.
It does rapidly tread into platform-specific behaviour and exactly how groups are used, yeah.
I wonder if a better choice might be to have a way to override the behavior. We're mostly trying to defend against an accidental misconfiguration after all. So perhaps we should have a way to specify something like sslkey=/foo/bar:insecure or something like that, which would ignore the permissions check on it. In this case it's very clearly a *voluntary* configuration that the user did, and therefor any analysis of the security of doing it is on them, but we retain the default behavior of clearly pointing out to a user that what they're doing might be insecure?
