PGS9-00-001100 - PostgreSQL must associate organization-defined types of security labels having organization-defined security label values with information in transmission.

Information

Without the association of security labels to information, there is no basis for PostgreSQL to make security-related access-control decisions.

Security labels are abstractions representing the basic properties or characteristics of an entity (e.g., subjects and objects) with respect to safeguarding information.

These labels are typically associated with internal data structures (e.g., tables, rows) within the database and are used to enable the implementation of access control and flow control policies, reflect special dissemination, handling or distribution instructions, or support other aspects of the information security policy.

One example includes marking data as classified or FOUO. These security labels may be assigned manually or during data processing, but, either way, it is imperative these assignments are maintained while the data is in storage. If the security labels are lost when the data is stored, there is the risk of a data compromise.

NOTE: Nessus has provided the target output to assist in reviewing the benchmark to ensure target compliance.

Solution

In addition to the SQL-standard privilege system available through GRANT, tables can have row security policies that restrict, on a per-user basis, which rows can be returned by normal queries or inserted, updated, or deleted by data modification commands. This feature is also known as Row-Level Security(RLS).

RLS policies can be very different depending on their use case. For one example of using RLS for Security Labels, see supplementary content APPENDIX-D.

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_PGS_SQL_9-x_V2R5_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: ACCESS CONTROL

References: 800-53|AC-16a., CAT|II, CCI|CCI-002264, Rule-ID|SV-214058r961275_rule, STIG-ID|PGS9-00-001100, STIG-Legacy|SV-87513, STIG-Legacy|V-72861, Vuln-ID|V-214058

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 9a8b44c9791d53dfef7675e5f727dc88ce11f6062a649bcd5f5208a8055253fc