add warning upon successful md5 password auth

From: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart(at)gmail(dot)com>
To: pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: add warning upon successful md5 password auth
Date: 2026-02-11 19:52:33
Message-ID: aYzeAYEbodkkg5e-@nathan
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From a related discussion last year [0]:

On Tue, Jun 03, 2025 at 12:09:50PM -0500, Nathan Bossart wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 03, 2025 at 09:43:59AM -0500, Nathan Bossart wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 03, 2025 at 10:34:06AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> If we really want to be in peoples' face about this, the thing
>>> to do is to print a warning every time they log in with an MD5
>>> password. Also, to Michael's point, that really would be exactly
>>> the same place where the eventual "sorry, not supported anymore"
>>> message will be.
>>
>> I held off on this because I was worried it might be far too noisy. That
>> does seem like it has the best chance of getting folks' attention, though.
>> If it's too noisy, users can always turn off the warnings.
>
> Here is a draft-grade patch that adds a WARNING upon successful
> authentication with an MD5 password. It's a little hacky because AFAICT we
> need to wait until well after authentication (for GUCs to be set up, etc.)
> before we actually emit the WARNING. When the time comes to remove MD5
> password support completely, we'll need to do something like modify
> CheckMD5Auth() to always return STATUS_ERROR with an appropriate logdetail
> message.

Since I just added a "connection warnings" infrastructure in commit
1d92e0c2cc, I thought it might be a good time to revisit this idea.
Attached is an updated patch. I'm not sure this is v19 material. It could
make sense to wait until v20 or something. But I figured it was worth at
least having the discussion.

[0] https://postgr.es/m/aD8sXgfJeIGLc7-t%40nathan

--
nathan

Attachment Content-Type Size
v1-0001-Add-warning-upon-successful-MD5-password-authenti.patch text/plain 3.0 KB

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