Compliance

Compliance#

TPA can generate configurations designed to make it easy for a cluster to comply with the STIG or CIS standards. If you pass --compliance stig or --compliance cis to tpaexec configure , TPA will:

  • Check that other options are compatible with the appropriate standard.

  • Add various entries to the generated config.yml , including marking that this is a cluster meant to comply with a particular standard and setting Postgres configuration as required by the standard.

  • Adjust some deployment tasks to enforce compliance.

  • Run checks at the end of deployment.

The deploy-time checks can be skipped by giving the option --excluded_tasks=compliance to tpaexec deploy . This feature is intended for testing only, when using a test system on which full compliance is impossible (for example, because SSL certificates are not available).

There are some situations in which TPA will intentionally fail to comply with the selected standard; these are documented under Exceptions below.

STIG#

STIG compliance is indicated by the --compliance stig option to tpaexec configure .

Option compatibility#

STIG compliance requires the bare platform and the epas flavour. It requires the RedHat OS with version 8 or 9.

Settings in config.yml#

The following entry is added to cluster_vars to use the SQL/Protect feature of EDB Postgres Advanced Server:

extra_postgres_extensions: [ sql_protect ]

The following entries are added to cluster_vars to force clients to use SSL authentication:

hba_force_hostssl: True
hba_force_certificate_auth: True
hba_cert_authentication_map: sslmap

The following entries are added to cluster_vars to set GUCs in postgresql.conf:

tcp_keepalives_idle: 10
tcp_keepalives_interval: 10
tcp_keepalives_count: 10
log_destination: "stderr"
postgres_log_file_mode: "0600"

The following entries are added to postgres_conf_settings in cluster_vars to set GUCs in postgresql.conf:

edb_audit: "xml"
edb_audit_statement: "all"
edb_audit_connect: "all"
edb_audit_disconnect: "all"
statement_timeout: 1000
client_min_messages: "ERROR"

Deployment differences#

During deployment, TPA will set connection limits for the database users it creates, corresponding to the number of connections that are needed for normal operation. As each user is set up, it will also check that an SSL client certificate has been provided for it.

Providing client ssl certificates#

STIG requires DOD-approved ssl certificates for client connections. These certificates can’t be generated by TPA and therefore must be supplied. When setting up authentication for a user from a node in the cluster, TPA will look for a certificate/key pair on the node. The certificate and key should be in files called <username>.crt and <username>.key in the directory given by the ssl_client_cert_dir setting. The default for this setting is / , so the files would be, for example, /barman.crt and /barman.key when the barman user is being set up.

Final checks#

At the end of deployment, TPA will check that the server has FIPS enabled.

Exceptions#

If you select EFM as the failover manager, TPA will configure password authentication for the EFM user. This goes against the STIG requirement that all TCP connections use certificate authentication. The reason for this exception is that EFM does not support certificate authentication.

CIS#

CIS compliance is indicated by the --compliance cis option to tpaexec configure .

Settings in config.yml#

The following entries are added to cluster_vars to set GUCs in postgresql.conf:

log_connections: "on"
log_disconnections: "on"

The following entry is added to cluster_vars to enable required extensions:

extra_postgres_extensions: ["passwordcheck", "pgaudit"]

The following entry is added to cluster_vars to set the umask for the postgres OS user:

extra_bash_rc_lines: "umask 0077"

The following entries are added to postgres_conf_settings in cluster_vars to set GUCs in postgresql.conf:

log_error_verbosity: "verbose"
log_line_prefix: "%m [%p]: [%l-1] db=%d,user=%u,app=%a,client=%h "
log_replication_commands: "on"
temp_file_limit: "1GB"

Final checks#

At the end of deployment, TPA will check that the server has FIPS enabled.

Exceptions#

TPA does not support pgBackRest as mentioned in the CIS specification. Instead TPA installs Barman.

TPA does not install and configure set_user as required by the CIS specification. This is because preventing logon by the Postgres user would leave TPA unable to connect to, and configure, the database.

Contents