Re: Proposal: Support custom authentication methods using hooks

Greetings,

* Michael Paquier (michael(at)paquier(dot)xyz) wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 04:42:55PM -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> > Keeping it around will just push out the point at which everyone will
> > finally be done with it, as there's really only two groups: those who
> > have already moved to scram, and those who won't move until they want to
> > upgrade to a release that doesn't have md5.
>
> FWIW, I am not sure if we are at this point yet. An extra reason to
> remove it would be that it is a support burden, but I don't have seen
> in recent memory any problems related to it that required any deep
> changes in the way to use it, and its code paths are independent.

Ongoing reports that there's a known vulnerability aren't great to have
to deal with. We can at least point people to scram but that's not
great.

> The last time I played with this area is the recent error handling
> improvement with cryptohashes but MD5 has actually helped here in
> detecting the problem as a patched OpenSSL would complain if trying to
> use MD5 as hash function when FIPS is enabled.

Having to continue to deal with md5 as an algorithm when it's known to
be notably less secure and so much so that organizations essentially ban
its use for exactly what we're using it for, in fact, another reason to
remove it, not a reason to keep it. Better code coverage testing of
error paths is the answer to making sure that our error handling behaves
properly.

Thanks,

Stephen