[zie]

> 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.

[staticassertion]

> 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.

That's odd, I just clearly delineated an option in which this is not the case. The DB enforces RLS, users provide the RLS token, and an app gates access to the db.

[zie]

I must have missed that in the comment stream.

It's not really any different than using pgbouncer or something similar. All it buys you is not having to use the PG protocol on the client.

There is no extra security here though. One could even argue you lose security here, since now you have to rely on the app to not get tokens confused, since they hold and use the tokens on behalf of the user. A single bad CVE in the app and one can become any user the app currently knows about.

[staticassertion]

I think the conversation is suffering from trying to solve a problem that's underspecified, which is going to just lead to a lot of "what if" questions. I've explained my concern with relying on a single boundary, which should not be contentious and I have given multiple examples of potential additional controls.