Access to external executables must be disabled or restricted.
An XCCDF Rule
Description
<VulnDiscussion>Information systems are capable of providing a wide variety of functions and services. Some of the functions and services, provided by default, may not be necessary to support essential organizational operations (e.g., key missions, functions). It is detrimental for applications to provide, or install by default, functionality exceeding requirements or mission objectives. Applications must adhere to the principles of least functionality by providing only essential capabilities. PostgreSQLs may spawn additional external processes to execute procedures that are defined in PostgreSQL but stored in external host files (external procedures). The spawned process used to execute the external procedure may operate within a different OS security context than PostgreSQL and provide unauthorized access to the host system.</VulnDiscussion><FalsePositives></FalsePositives><FalseNegatives></FalseNegatives><Documentable>false</Documentable><Mitigations></Mitigations><SeverityOverrideGuidance></SeverityOverrideGuidance><PotentialImpacts></PotentialImpacts><ThirdPartyTools></ThirdPartyTools><MitigationControl></MitigationControl><Responsibility></Responsibility><IAControls></IAControls>
- ID
- SV-233593r960963_rule
- Severity
- Medium
- References
- Updated
Remediation - Manual Procedure
To remove superuser from a role, as the database administrator (shown here as "postgres"), run the following SQL:
$ sudo su - postgres
$ psql -c "ALTER ROLE <role-name> WITH NOSUPERUSER"
To remove extensions from PostgreSQL, as the database administrator (shown here as "postgres"), run the following SQL: