Re: Storing the password in .pgpass file in an encrypted format

From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
To: Jeff Janes <jeff(dot)janes(at)gmail(dot)com>
Cc: Euler Taveira <euler(at)timbira(dot)com(dot)br>, firoz e v <firoz(dot)ev(at)huawei(dot)com>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Storing the password in .pgpass file in an encrypted format
Date: 2014-02-21 16:20:00
Message-ID: 20140221162000.GL4759@eldon.alvh.no-ip.org
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Jeff Janes escribió:
> On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 7:04 AM, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>wrote:

> > If you were to have a mechanism by which
> > libpq can store an md5'd password (or whatever hash) and send that md5
> > to the server and have the server accept it to grant a connection, then
> > the md5 has, in effect, become the unencrypted password which others can
> > capture from the file, and you're back at square one.
>
> The string in .pgpass would be enough for people to log into postgresql,
> true. But it would not work to log onto other things which share the same
> clear-text password but don't share the same salting mechanism.

That's true. Patches welcome to improve that. Maybe we can define that
if the stored password string starts with $1$md5$ and has a just the
right length then it's a md5 hash rather than cleartext, or something
like that.

I do fear that people are going to look at the file and say "hey, it's
encrypted [sic] so it's secure! I can share the file with the world!".

--
Álvaro Herrera http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services

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