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help / color / mirror / Atom feedFrom: Greg Sabino Mullane <[email protected]>
To: Siraj G <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Cc: Ron Johnson <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: hide data from admins
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2025 15:17:00 -0400
Message-ID: <CAKAnmmJVZOmX8Cjq+xPZd0k9YbXO=TRn78cV0iny7EpbEQefpg@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAC5iy63SkK=C2f4Z+C9110brQPKEGLxpOn8fLnPs4A2vsMmpAA@mail.gmail.com>
References: <CAC5iy63SkK=C2f4Z+C9110brQPKEGLxpOn8fLnPs4A2vsMmpAA@mail.gmail.com>
On Tue, Mar 11, 2025 at 9:48 PM Siraj G <[email protected]> wrote:
> What are the features available in Postgresql to hide PII (personal
> identifiable information) from the Admin team?
>
Can you explain your threat model here, and who exactly the "Admin team" is
and what access they have? As a general rule of thumb, anyone with "root"
command-line access to the server can get at your data. You can introduce
some speed bumps (e.g. TDE), but truly locking it down is a very difficult
thing to do.
> Like in Oracle we have data vault
>
Nothing equivalent, other than locking down the superuser account(s) and
making sure people always connect as some other account. You can exclude
the superusers from logging in via pg_hba.conf (which can of course be
edited). TDE (transparent data encryption) can help for some threats.
> and data redaction
>
In addition the aforementioned pg_sodium project, you can check out pg
anonymizer:
https://postgresql-anonymizer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
As far as restricting/masking data, take a look at row-level security,
creative use of views, forcing access through user-defined functions, and
column-level permissions:
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/ddl-rowsecurity.html
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createview.html
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createfunction.html
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-grant.html
Honestly the best and easiest solution is to keep your servers secure, use
OS-level encryption, and encrypt your backups.
Cheers,
Greg
--
Crunchy Data - https://www.crunchydata.com
Enterprise Postgres Software Products & Tech Support
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To: [email protected]
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Subject: Re: hide data from admins
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