| Without the association of security labels to information, there is no basis for EDB Postgres Advanced Server to make security-related access-control decisions.
Security labels are abstractions representing the basic properties or characteristics of an entity (e.g., subjects and objects) with respect to safeguarding information.
These labels are typically associated with internal data structures (e.g., tables, rows) within the database and are used to enable the implementation of access control and flow control policies, reflect special dissemination, handling or distribution instructions, or support other aspects of the information security policy.
One example includes marking data as classified or FOUO. These security labels may be assigned manually or during data processing, but, either way, it is imperative these assignments are maintained while the data is in storage. If the security labels are lost when the data is stored, there is the risk of a data compromise.
The mechanism used to support security labeling may be a feature of EDB Postgres Advanced Server, a third-party product, or custom application code.
In addition to being able to grant privileges on tables using standard SQL features, EDB Postgres Advanced Server provides a Row Level Security (RLS) feature. This feature provides the ability to define and enable row-level security policies that restrict insert, update, delete, and select access on the rows of a table on a per user basis. For deployments within the DoD, RLS policies are configured to use the assigned security labels. |
