Re: [PoC] Let libpq reject unexpected authentication requests

On 3/4/22 20:19, Tom Lane wrote:
> Jacob Champion <pchampion(at)vmware(dot)com> writes:
>> $subject keeps coming up in threads. I think my first introduction to
>> it was after the TLS injection CVE, and then it came up again in the
>> pluggable auth thread. It's hard for me to generalize based on "sound
>> bites", but among the proposals I've seen are
>> 1. reject plaintext passwords
>> 2. reject a configurable list of unacceptable methods
>> 3. allow client and server to negotiate a method
>> All of them seem to have merit.
> Agreed.
>
>> Here is my take on option 2, then: you get to choose exactly one method
>> that the client will accept. If you want to use client certificates,
>> use require_auth=cert. If you want to force SCRAM, use
>> require_auth=scram-sha-256. If the server asks for something different,
>> libpq will fail. If the server tries to get away without asking you for
>> authentication, libpq will fail. There is no negotiation.
> Seems reasonable, but I bet that for very little more code you could
> accept a comma-separated list of allowed methods; libpq already allows
> comma-separated lists for some other connection options. That seems
> like it'd be a useful increment of flexibility.
>
>

Just about necessary I guess, since you can specify that a client cert
is required in addition to some other auth method, so for such cases you
might want something like "required_auth=cert,scram-sha-256"? Or do we
need a way of specifying the combination?

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com