Re: Proposal: Support custom authentication methods using hooks

Hi,

On 2022-03-02 15:26:32 -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> Part of the point, for my part anyway, of dropping support for plaintext
> transmission would be to remove support for that from libpq, otherwise a
> compromised server could still potentially convince a client to provide
> a plaintext password be sent to it.

IMO that's an argument for an opt-in option to permit plaintext, not an
argument for removal of the code alltogether. Even that will need a long
transition time, because it's effectively a form of an ABI break. Upgrading
libpq will suddenly cause applications to stop working. So adding an opt-out
option to disable plaintext is the next step...

I don't think it makes sense to discuss this topic as part of this thread
really. It seems wholly independent of making authentication pluggable.

> I also just generally disagree with the idea that it makes sense for
> these things to be in contrib. We should be dropping them because
> they're insecure- moving them to contrib doesn't change the issue that
> we're distributing authentication solutions that send (either through an
> encrypted tunnel, or not, neither is good) that pass plaintext passwords
> around.

Shrug. I don't think it's a good idea to just leave people hanging without a
replacement. It's OK to make it a bit harder and require explicit
configuration, but dropping support for reasonable configurations IMO is
something we should be very hesitant doing.

Greetings,

Andres Freund