Jacob Champion <pchamp...@vmware.com> writes: > On Fri, 2021-01-29 at 17:30 -0500, Tom Lane wrote: >> What happens if ALTER USER RENAME is done while the session is still >> alive?
> IMO the authenticated identity should be write-once. Especially since > one of my goals is to have greater auditability into events as they've > actually happened. So ALTER USER RENAME should have no effect. > This also doesn't really affect third-party auth methods. If I'm bound > as pchamp...@example.com and a superuser changes my username to tlane, > you _definitely_ don't want to see my authenticated identity change to > tl...@example.com. That's not who I am. Ah. So basically, this comes into play when you consider that some outside-the-database entity is your "real" authenticated identity. That seems reasonable when using Kerberos or the like, though it's not real meaningful for traditional password-type authentication. I'd misunderstood your point before. So, if we store this "real" identity, is there any security issue involved in exposing it to other users (via pg_stat_activity or whatever)? I remain concerned about the cost and inconvenience of exposing it via log_line_prefix, but at least that shouldn't be visible to anyone who's not entitled to know who's logged in ... regards, tom lane