Re: Encoding protection for pgcrypto

The following review has been posted through the commitfest application:
make installcheck-world: tested, failed
Implements feature: not tested
Spec compliant: not tested
Documentation: not tested

Hello

I had a look at your patch, which applies fine to PostgreSQL master. I noticed that the new regression tests you have added to test utf-8 encoding fails on my setup (make check) with the following diffs:

---------------------------------------
@ -13,6 +13,7 @@
=ivrD
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
'), '0123456789abcdefghij'), 'sha1');
+ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0x91
-- Database encoding protection. Ciphertext source:
-- printf '\xe0\xe0\xbff' | gpg --batch --passphrase mykey --textmode --armor --symmetric
select pgp_sym_decrypt(dearmor('
@@ -23,5 +24,5 @@
=QKy4
-----END PGP MESSAGE-----
'), 'mykey', 'debug=1');
+ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8": 0xe0 0xe0 0xbf
\quit
-\endif
---------------------------------------

I am not sure but it seems that you intentionally provide a text input that would produce a non-utf-8 compliant decrypted output, which triggers the error from within "pg_verifymbstr()" call that you have added in pgp-pgsql.c? Are the errors expected in your new test case? If so, then the tests shall pass instead because it has caught a invalid encoding in decrypted output.

Generally, I am ok with the extra encoding check after text decryption but do not think if it is a good idea to just error out and abort the transaction when it detects invalid encoding character. text decryption routines may be used quite frequently and users generally do not expect them to abort transaction. It may be ok to just give them a warning about invalid character encoding.

thanks
--------------------
Cary Huang
Highgo Software - Canada
www.highgo.ca