On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 06:47:49PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > Dave Page <dp...@pgadmin.org> writes: > > Updated application name patch, including a GUC assign hook to clean > > the application name of any unsafe characters, per discussion. > > Applied with assorted editorialization. There were a couple of > definitional issues that I don't recall if we had consensus on: > > 1. The patch prevents non-superusers from seeing other users' > application names in pg_stat_activity. This seems at best pretty > debatable to me. Yes, it supports usages in which you want to put > security-sensitive information into the appname, but at the cost of > disabling (perfectly reasonable) usages where you don't. If we made > the app name universally visible, people simply wouldn't put security > sensitive info in it, the same as they don't put it on the command line. > Should we change this? > > (While I'm looking at it, I wonder why client_addr and client_port > are similarly hidden.)
I vote for showing it to everyone, superuser or otherwise, though I can't really say why I feel that way. > 2. I am wondering if we should mark application_name as > GUC_NO_RESET_ALL. As-is, the value sent at libpq initialization > will be lost during RESET ALL, which would probably surprise people. > On the other hand, not resetting it might surprise other people. > If we were able to send it in the startup packet then this wouldn't > be a problem, but we are far from being able to do that. Nothing I've written uses RESET ALL, but if it did, I expect it would be because whatever the connection was being used for in the past differs substantially from whatever I plan to use it for in the future, which seems a suitable time also to change application_name. I vote against GUC_NO_RESET_ALL. -- Joshua Tolley / eggyknap End Point Corporation http://www.endpoint.com
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
