[CKAN-support] datastore permissions issue

[Adrià Mercader]

Hi George,

Sorry for taking a while to answer.

There are two issues here.

* The ability to create and delete new tables, and insert rows to them
is caused by a misconfiguration of the datastore permissions. The
maintainers of that instance need to run one of this methods to set up
permissions properly (I'm linking to relevant version docs for
https://staging.data.qld.gov.au, newer versions may need to use
another docs version)

http://docs.ckan.org/en/ckan-2.0.4/datastore-setup.html#set-permissions


* The ability to access system tables is a known issue and we are
discussing the best way to handle it. Although this may leak some
information, users should not be able to perform any inserts or
deletions on this tables, or extract sensitive information like
passwords if the permissions are properly configured.

Access to this tables can not be revoked at the database level, as the
way Postgres works this tables need to be accessed by the query
planner, so we need to limit access to them at the application level.
This is straight forward to use on the latest CKAN version but a bit
more difficult on previous ones. We'll let you know as soon as we have
a working patch.

Let me know if you have any other question,

Adrià


On 25 July 2014 06:42, George Sattler <George.sattler at xvt.com.au> wrote:
> Hi Guys
>
> A bit of an urgent support request if you have a sec to have a look and give
> me some advice…
>
>
>
> I received the below from Smart Service Queensland regarding their sites. It
> appears that it is possible to create, edit, and drop tables using the
> datastore API. I suppose this must be due to a mis-configuration of the
> permissions for the datastore. Would this make sense to you? I’ll probably
> need to run the permission statements again (or for the first time)?
>
>
>
> Actually for that ‘pg_catalog’ request below, I was able to run this
> successfully on the demo.ckan.org website. I’m not sure what this might
> reveal or if it should be kept secret or not?
>
> Hi,
>
> It has come to our attention that the datastorer sql search functionality
> allows you to execute any sql query as the datastore database user. Queries
> seem to be limited to the privileges of the datastore user, i.e. it gave an
> SQL error when I tried to insert into a data set.
>
> I have confirmed that you can:
> * Select from postgres public system tables/views
> * Create tables
> * Insert into tables
> * Update rows in tables
> * Drop tables
>
> Can you please advise if you or CKAN/OKFN are aware of this issue and if so
> what the recommend fix is?
>
> URL examples are below:
> https://staging.data.qld.gov.au/api/action/datastore_search_sql?sql=create
> table temp_test_dlb (dummy decimal);
> https://staging.data.qld.gov.au/api/action/datastore_search_sql?sql=insert
> into temp_test_dlb values (1234);
> https://staging.data.qld.gov.au/api/action/datastore_search_sql?sql=select *
> from temp_test_dlb;
> https://staging.data.qld.gov.au/api/action/datastore_search_sql?sql=select *
> from pg_catalog.pg_class;
> https://staging.data.qld.gov.au/api/action/datastore_search_sql?sql=drop
> table temp_test_dlb;
>
>
>
>
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