V-261890

Discussion

To assure accountability and prevent unauthenticated access, organizational users must be identified and authenticated to prevent potential misuse and compromise of the system. Organizational users include organizational employees or individuals the organization deems to have equivalent status of employees (e.g., contractors). Organizational users (and any processes acting on behalf of users) must be uniquely identified and authenticated for all accesses, except the following: (i) Accesses explicitly identified and documented by the organization. Organizations document specific user actions that can be performed on the information system without identification or authentication; and (ii) Accesses that occur through authorized use of group authenticators without individual authentication. Organizations may require unique identification of individuals using shared accounts, for detailed accountability of individual activity.

Check Content

Review PostgreSQL settings to determine whether organizational users are uniquely identified and authenticated when logging on/connecting to the system.

To list all roles in the database, as the database administrator (shown here as "postgres"), run the following SQL:

$ sudo su - postgres
$ psql -c "\du"

If organizational users are not uniquely identified and authenticated, this is a finding.

As the database administrator (shown here as "postgres"), verify the current pg_hba.conf authentication settings:

$ sudo su - postgres
$ cat ${PGDATA?}/pg_hba.conf

If every role does not have unique authentication requirements, this is a finding.

If accounts are determined to be shared, determine if individuals are first individually authenticated. If individuals are not individually authenticated before using the shared account, this is a finding.