Re: Patch proposal: make use of regular expressions for the username in pg_hba.conf

Hi,

On 9/20/22 6:30 AM, Michael Paquier wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 20, 2022 at 12:09:33AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> You have to assume that somebody (a) has a role or DB name starting
>> with slash, (b) has an explicit reference to that name in their
>> pg_hba.conf, (c) doesn't read the release notes, and (d) doesn't
>> notice that things are misbehaving until after some hacker manages
>> to break into their installation on the strength of the misbehaving
>> entry. OK, I'll grant that the probability of (c) is depressingly
>> close to unity; but each of the other steps seems quite low probability.
>> All four of them happening in one installation is something I doubt
>> will happen.
>
> It is the kind of things that could blow up as a CVE and some bad PR
> for the project, so I cannot get excited about enforcing this new rule
> in an authentication file (aka before a role is authenticated) while
> we are talking about 3~4 code paths (?) that would need an extra check
> to make sure that no instances have such object names.

I also have the feeling that having (a), (b) and (d) is low probability.

That said, If the user "/john" already exists and has a hba entry then
this entry will still match with the patch. Problem is that all the
users that contain "john" would also now match.

But things get worst if say /a is an existing user and hba entry as the
entry would match any users that contains "a" with the patch.

I assume (maybe i should not) that if objects starting with / already
exist there is very good reason(s) behind. Then I don't think that
preventing their creation in the DDL would help (quite the contrary for
the ones that really need them).

It looks to me that adding a GUC (off by default) to enable/disable the
regexp usage in the hba could be a fair compromise. It won't block any
creation starting with a / and won't open more doors (if such objects
exist) by default.

Regards,

--
Bertrand Drouvot
PostgreSQL Contributors Team
RDS Open Source Databases
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com