On Sun, Mar 2, 2014 at 6:20 AM, Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com> wrote:
On Sat, Mar 01, 2014 at 05:51:46PM -0500, Andrew Dunstan wrote: > On 03/01/2014 05:10 PM, Tom Lane wrote: > >One other thought here: is it actually reasonable to expend a lot of effort > >on the Windows case? I'm not aware that people normally expect a Windows > >box to have multiple users at all, let alone non-mutually-trusting users. > > As Stephen said, it's fairly unusual. There are usually quite a few > roles, but it's rare to have more than one "human" type role > connected to the machine at a given time.
I, too, agree it's rare. Rare enough to justify leaving the vulnerability open on Windows, indefinitely? I'd say not. Windows itself has been pushing steadily toward better multi-user support over the past 15 years or so. Releasing software for Windows as though it were a single-user platform is backwards-looking. We should be a model in this area, not a straggler.
Terminal Services have definitely become more common over time, but with faster and cheaper virtualization, a lot of people have switched to that instead, which would remove the problem of course.
I wonder how common it actually is, though, to *build postgres* on a terminal services machine with other users on it...
Not saying we can't ignore it, and I gree that we should not be a straggler on this, so doing a proper fix wwould definitely be the better.
> I'd be happy doing nothing in this case, or not very much. e.g. > provide a password but not with great cryptographic strength.
One option that would simplify things is to fix only non-Windows in the back branches, via socket protection, and fix Windows in HEAD only. We could even do so by extending HAVE_UNIX_SOCKETS support to Windows through named pipes.
That could certainly be a useful feature of it's own. But as you say, non-backpatchable.
