51.8. pg_authid

The catalog pg_authid contains information about database authorization identifiers (roles). A role subsumes the concepts of “users” and “groups”. A user is essentially just a role with the rolcanlogin flag set. Any role (with or without rolcanlogin) can have other roles as members; see pg_auth_members.

Since this catalog contains passwords, it must not be publicly readable. pg_roles is a publicly readable view on pg_authid that blanks out the password field.

Chapter 21 contains detailed information about user and privilege management.

Because user identities are cluster-wide, pg_authid is shared across all databases of a cluster: there is only one copy of pg_authid per cluster, not one per database.

Table 51.8. pg_authid Columns

Column Type Description
oid oid Row identifier
rolname name Role name
rolsuper bool Role has superuser privileges
rolinherit bool Role automatically inherits privileges of roles it is a member of
rolcreaterole bool Role can create more roles
rolcreatedb bool Role can create databases
rolcanlogin bool Role can log in. That is, this role can be given as the initial session authorization identifier
rolreplication bool Role is a replication role. A replication role can initiate replication connections and create and drop replication slots.
rolbypassrls bool Role bypasses every row level security policy, see Section 5.8 for more information.
rolconnlimit int4 For roles that can log in, this sets maximum number of concurrent connections this role can make. -1 means no limit.
rolpassword text Password (possibly encrypted); null if none. The format depends on the form of encryption used.
rolvaliduntil timestamptz Password expiry time (only used for password authentication); null if no expiration

For an MD5 encrypted password, rolpassword column will begin with the string md5 followed by a 32-character hexadecimal MD5 hash. The MD5 hash will be of the user's password concatenated to their user name. For example, if user joe has password xyzzy, PostgreSQL will store the md5 hash of xyzzyjoe.

If the password is encrypted with SCRAM-SHA-256, it has the format:

SCRAM-SHA-256$<iteration count>:<salt>$<StoredKey>:<ServerKey>

where salt, StoredKey and ServerKey are in Base64 encoded format. This format is the same as that specified by RFC 5803.

A password that does not follow either of those formats is assumed to be unencrypted.