Previously, CREATEROLE users were permitted to make nearly arbitrary
changes to roles that they didn't create, with certain exceptions,
particularly superuser roles. Instead, allow CREATEROLE users to make such
changes to roles for which they possess ADMIN OPTION, and to
grant membership only in roles for which they possess ADMIN OPTION.
When a CREATEROLE user who is not a superuser creates a role, grant
ADMIN OPTION on the newly-created role to the creator, so that they
can administer roles they create or for which they have been given
privileges.
With these changes, CREATEROLE users still have very significant
powers that unprivileged users do not receive: they can alter, rename,
drop, comment on, change the password for, and change security labels
on roles. However, they can now do these things only for roles for
which they possess appropriate privileges, rather than all
non-superuser roles; moreover, they cannot grant a role such as
pg_execute_server_program unless they themselves possess it.
Patch by me, reviewed by Mark Dilger.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmobN59ct+Emmz6ig1Nua2Q-_o=r6DSD98KfU53kctq_kQw@mail.gmail.com
Previously, membership of role A in role B could be recorded in the
catalog tables only once. This meant that a new grant of role A to
role B would overwrite the previous grant. For other object types, a
new grant of permission on an object - in this case role A - exists
along side the existing grant provided that the grantor is different.
Either grant can be revoked independently of the other, and
permissions remain so long as at least one grant remains. Make role
grants work similarly.
Previously, when granting membership in a role, the superuser could
specify any role whatsoever as the grantor, but for other object types,
the grantor of record must be either the owner of the object, or a
role that currently has privileges to perform a similar GRANT.
Implement the same scheme for role grants, treating the bootstrap
superuser as the role owner since roles do not have owners. This means
that attempting to revoke a grant, or admin option on a grant, can now
fail if there are dependent privileges, and that CASCADE can be used
to revoke these. It also means that you can't grant ADMIN OPTION on
a role back to a user who granted it directly or indirectly to you,
similar to how you can't give WITH GRANT OPTION on a privilege back
to a role which granted it directly or indirectly to you.
Previously, only the superuser could specify GRANTED BY with a user
other than the current user. Relax that rule to allow the grantor
to be any role whose privileges the current user posseses. This
doesn't improve compatibility with what we do for other object types,
where support for GRANTED BY is entirely vestigial, but it makes this
feature more usable and seems to make sense to change at the same time
we're changing related behaviors.
Along the way, fix "ALTER GROUP group_name ADD USER user_name" to
require the same privileges as "GRANT group_name TO user_name".
Previously, CREATEROLE privileges were sufficient for either, but
only the former form was permissible with ADMIN OPTION on the role.
Now, either CREATEROLE or ADMIN OPTION on the role suffices for
either spelling.
Patch by me, reviewed by Stephen Frost.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoaFr-RZeQ+WoQ5nKPv97oT9+aDgK_a5+qWHSgbDsMp1Vg@mail.gmail.com
Previously, "GRANT foo TO bar" or "GRANT foo TO bar GRANTED BY baz"
would record the OID of the grantor in pg_auth_members.grantor, but
that role could later be dropped without modifying or removing the
pg_auth_members record. That's not great, because we typically try
to avoid dangling references in catalog data.
Now, a role grant depends on the grantor, and the grantor can't be
dropped without removing the grant or changing the grantor. "DROP
OWNED BY" will remove the grant, just as it does for other kinds of
privileges. "REASSIGN OWNED BY" will not, again just like what we do
in other cases involving privileges.
pg_auth_members now has an OID column, because that is needed in order
for dependencies to work. It also now has an index on the grantor
column, because otherwise dropping a role would require a sequential
scan of the entire table to see whether the role's OID is in use as
a grantor. That probably wouldn't be too large a problem in practice,
but it seems better to have an index just in case.
A follow-on patch is planned with the goal of more thoroughly
rationalizing the behavior of role grants. This patch is just trying
to do enough to make sure that the data we store in the catalogs is at
some basic level valid.
Patch by me, reviewed by Stephen Frost
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoaFr-RZeQ+WoQ5nKPv97oT9+aDgK_a5+qWHSgbDsMp1Vg@mail.gmail.com
