PostgreSQL default access privileges

By default, PostgreSQL users—also known as roles with login option—can access the public schema. Also, note that the default PostgreSQL authentication policy allows users to access all databases from the localhost using peer authentication on a Linux system. Also, a user can create objects in the public schema of any database he/she can access; for example, the user can create a function and execute it in the public schema. In addition to this, the user can alter some settings.

The user cannot access other user objects in the public schema or create databases and schemas. However, the user can sniff data about the database objects by querying the system catalog. Unprivileged users can get information about other users, table structure, table owner, some table statistics, and so on. The following example shows how the user test is able to get information about table a, which is owned by a postgres user:

test=> SELECT * FROM a;
ERROR:  permission denied...