Re: SCRAM with channel binding downgrade attack

From: Michael Paquier <michael(at)paquier(dot)xyz>
To: Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us>
Cc: Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net>, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net>
Subject: Re: SCRAM with channel binding downgrade attack
Date: 2018-05-22 08:22:19
Message-ID: 20180522082218.GA12027@paquier.xyz
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On Sat, May 19, 2018 at 09:35:57PM +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:
> The previous patch has actually problems with servers using "trust",
> "password" and any protocol which can send directly AUTH_REQ_OK as those
> could still enforce a downgrade to not use channel binding, so we
> actually need to make sure that AUTH_REQ_SASL_FIN has been received when
> channel binding is required when looking at a AUTH_REQ_OK message.

Okay, so I have digested the previous comments with the attached.
scram_channel_binding is modified as follows (from commit message):
- "prefer", is the default and behaves so as channel binding is used if
available. If the cluster does not support it then it is not used. This
does not protect from downgrade attacks.
- "disable", which is the equivalent of the empty value previously,
disables channel binding.
- "tls-unique" and "tls-server-end-point" make channel binding a
requirement and use the channel binding of the same name for
connection. Note that in this case, if the connection is attempted
without SSL or if server does not support channel binding then libpq
refuses the connection as well.

In order to make sure that a client is not tricked by a "trust"
connection downgrade which sends back directly AUTH_REQ_OK, one way I
have thought about is to check if the client has achieved with a server
a full SASL exchange when receiving this message type, which is
something that we know about as the exchange state is saved in
PGconn->sasl_state.

The patch includes documentation and tests, which check that connections
are refused without SSL and or if the server downgrades authentication
requests.

Thanks,
--
Michael

Attachment Content-Type Size
0001-Rework-scram_channel_binding-to-protect-from-downgra.patch text/x-diff 19.7 KB

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