PostgreSQL is known and loved for its stability and feature set. Recent releases have concentrated primarily on improvements under the hood, increasing its performance and efficiency. So, how about the PostgreSQL security? We will talk about that. At a glance what will be the most important thing about security. We might say that data should be the focus or core in the organization and a significant amount of organization data lives in a database. If you have to choose where to invest in security, the database is the right place.

Security is Integral to all enterprises

Today, business assets in the IT environment, including data and databases, need to be secured. Products and services are emerging in the data security software market that address the need to secure data where it resides and to implement access controls at the data level. Why we say it as bare necessities as well because there is some standard we need to achieve and the beneficial reason behind the data security, it’s easier to define by looking at the benefits, which are explained below in detail:

1. Keep your information safe. We ensure that the sensitive information does not fall into the wrong hands.
2. Helps keep your reputation clean. When people do business with us they entrust their information with us, we need to keep our data as well as our reputation.
3. Gives you a competitive edge. We might say if we have good data security we are beyond our competitors that have not implemented the security.
4. Saves on support and development costs. If we implement security from the beginning, we don’t have to spend valuable resources designing security down the road with existing infrastructure.

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG) takes security seriously. This allows our users to place their trust in PostgreSQL for protecting their mission-critical data. The PostgreSQL Global Development Group follows a model that shares responsibility between PostgreSQL itself and its deployment environment, including hardware, operating system, and the application layer (programming language, frameworks and client libraries). The PostgreSQL documentation provides info on the inherent security features of PostgreSQL and how to securely configure and run PostgreSQL. Security vulnerabilities can exist both in PostgreSQL and software within the PostgreSQL ecosystem, including client libraries, extensions, installers, and other utilities.

Consideration to Securing Postgres

We might say that to secure our Postgres Database we should pay attention to these 5 points that help for data security. Otherwise, we are vulnerable for the cyber-attack. To successfully create a safe and secure environment for PostgreSQL we could taking care of these few points:

• Database Access / Permissions
  First of all the database access should be engaging the right permissions. It should be, so no one can access the database without permission.
  1) Do not use the default port 5432.
  2) Change the listen_address database parameter to specific ip_address.
  3) Implement the additional firewall in the operating system.
• Database Authentication
  Another security component to be considered is client authentication, how we authenticate users and control whether or not they can connect to the server successfully through the pg_hba.conf configuration file.
  1) Do not use the trust method in pg_hba configuration.
  2) Mention only specific user and ip address which need to connect to the database instance.
  3) Use the md5 encryption or scram-sha-256 authentication method for the connection
  4) Using SSL for secure client connection
• Roles
  The next critical component in securing a Postgres deployment is the creation and setting of roles, which can limit database access for specific users.
  1) Create specific users only needed by the user.
  2) Limit the roles assignment and attribute to the specific user and schema.
• Data Access Control
  As part of examining the security setup of your Postgres deployment, it is important to look at data access control and how we can prevent users from accessing data that they should not be able to access. Row Level Security or RLS is a technology available in Postgres that allows you to define policies that limit the visibility of rows in a table to certain roles.
  1) Enable Row Level Security on the table.
• Encryption
  Another component to consider when executing end-to-end security for Postgres is encrypting sensitive data. There are a number of methods and extensions available that can be configured to provide additional security through encryption. For this we can leverage pg_crypto to help the encryption and decryption process.
  1) Enable TDE on the respective tables.
• Secure Architecture
  Also you can think more about how safe the data in your architecture or data center is. It would come into how secure the access and who and access your data. It is best to keep your data far behind the architecture, we might say considering a DMZ architecture to secure your data. DMZ Network is network space that protects and adds an extra layer of security to an organization’s internal LAN (Local Area Network) from untrusted traffic. A common DMZ is a subnetwork that sits between the public internet and private networks. The end goal of a DMZ is to allow an organization to access untrusted networks.

Image of DMZ Architecture

Accessing sensitive data is the goal of most, if not all, cyberattacks. Hackers target databases because most mission-critical and sensitive data is stored in them. The most common database security breaches revolve around compromised user credentials or rogue users. Software is limited in its ability to prevent people from knowingly or unknowingly leaking or losing credentials, and certainty can not stop rogue users from doing damage. We can safely implement our security baseline as well to keep our data safe through the database hardening.

We at Ashnik can help you by offering consulting services, technical services, migration services, managed services, and training programs in several open-source technologies and share with you our experience of helping several enterprises across SEA and India. We can help you put together database platforms, and high-speed data pipelines and re-architect your applications using DevOps automation, Kubernetes, and microservices architecture, and facilitate multi-cloud or hybrid adoption.

It is very important for the database server to be resilient, scalable, flexible, and secure while still supporting collaboration. Ashnik also provides you with the ability to monitor and secure your PostgreSQL database, in a meaningful way. We are ready to help you make timely actions through our expertise in open source services, support, and solutions.

Get in touch today for a free consultation with our team of experts!

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