alt Hacker News> Your SSO system is a lot of pressure on one control too. Nobody seems to have problems with Azure or Okta or whatever SSO system you use having every key to the kingdom.
Some do, which is why they want MFA on the target side as well as on their SSO. But yes, SSO is very scary and there's a ton of security pressure on it. I don't think that's a very good argument for why we should think that every system should only require one layer of defense.
I'm going to sort of skip over any comparison to SSO since I'm not going to defend the position of "SSO is fine as a single barrier", especially as SSO is rarely implemented with one policy - there's device attestation, 2FA, etc.
> RLS has been around a long time and is very stable and doesn't change much.
RLS is great, I'm a fan.
> I don't remember the last CVE or outage we had with PG that broke stuff.
It doesn't really matter. The fact is that you're one CVE away from every employee having access to arbitrary data, including financial data. I feel a bit like a broken record saying this.
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> It doesn't really matter. The fact is that you're one CVE away from every employee having access to arbitrary data, including financial data. I feel a bit like a broken record saying this.
Sure, but it's the same with pretty much any other app architecture.
Either your app has all the data access and you put your access control there, or you do the access control in the database. There really aren't other options here. There isn't access control defense in depth here. The best you can really do is do some data encryption of the data in the tables. We do some of that, but it's such a PITA that we relegate it to special stuff only.
> especially as SSO is rarely implemented with one policy - there's device attestation, 2FA, etc.
Sure but ALL of that relies on the SSO system behaving as advertised, so you think of it as separate policies, but it really isn't. It's once SSO CVE away from giving away the store. We use SSO with PG, that's how they authenticate to PG, we are fans of SSO too.
Row level security is absolutely fine.
Most companies, or at least the ones I've worked at, don't use row level security at all. Instead, the application just accesses the multi tenant database.
It's absolutely littered with broken access control vulnerabilities. You have to remember to put the user key and group in every query across the entire application. And then there's dynamic queries and ORMs, which make everything worse. Now you cant even audit the source code, you have to observe behavior.
Most people don't know their applications have these vulnerabilities, but they're very common.