Re: Modern SHA2- based password hashes for pgcrypto

From: Bernd Helmle <mailings(at)oopsware(dot)de>
To: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)alvh(dot)no-ip(dot)org>
Cc: Japin Li <japinli(at)hotmail(dot)com>, PostgreSQL Development <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Modern SHA2- based password hashes for pgcrypto
Date: 2025-04-07 07:03:30
Message-ID: 55cc06ae36d662ae36a39ec68da005ad63f95084.camel@oopsware.de
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Am Sonntag, dem 06.04.2025 um 15:43 -0400 schrieb Tom Lane:
> What this is on about is that portable use of isalpha() or isdigit()
> requires casting a "char" value to "unsigned char".  I was about to
> make that simple change when I started to question if we actually
> want to be using <ctype.h> here at all.  Do you REALLY intend that
> any random non-ASCII letter is okay to include in the decoded_salt?
> Are you okay with that filter being locale-dependent?
>
> I'd be more comfortable with a check like
>
> if (strchr("...valid chars...", *ep) != NULL)
>

Hmm, the idea was to allow a wider range of letters for the salt. This
came from my experiments that openssl allows more than just the ones
from _crypt_itoa64. But after reading this, i realized even isalpha()
isn't enough, since e.g. mulitbyte character wouldn't work anyways,
like openssl allows:

echo -n password | openssl passwd -5 -salt ÄÖÜ -stdin
$5$ÄÖÜ$NduBUgCdzvnW1lW8EMxW9DuxN6HmT0niS7H4ftRxuX0

So we would have to test for these cases, too. I looked again into
pyhon's passlib, and they don't accept any non-ASCII fancy characters,
neither.

So i think Tom has a point, we can restrict this to the characters from
_crypt_itoa64 and go that route. I am not sure about externally
generated hashes which are going to be stored in postgres and validated
later there. This can restrict the use case perhaps.

> It looks like "_crypt_itoa64" might be directly usable as the
> valid-chars string, too.  (BTW, why is _crypt_itoa64 not
> marked const?)

That's an oversight by me.

I can create a patch with the fixes (and the one Andres' reported) for
today.

Thanks

Bernd

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