Re: pg_authid.rolpassword format (was Re: Password identifiers, protocol aging and SCRAM protocol)

Michael,

* Michael Paquier (michael(dot)paquier(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 5:42 AM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> > * Peter Eisentraut (peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com) wrote:
> >> On 12/15/16 8:40 AM, Stephen Frost wrote:
> >> > I don't follow why we can't change the syntax for CREATE USER to allow
> >> > specifying the verifier type independently.
> >>
> >> That's what the last patch set I looked at actually does.
> >
> > Well, same here, but it was quite a while ago and things have progressed
> > since then wrt SCRAM, as I understand it...
>
> From the discussions of last year on -hackers, it was decided to *not*
> have an additional column per complains from a couple of hackers

It seems that, at best, we didn't have consensus on it. Hopefully we
are moving in a direction of consensus.

> (Robert you were in this set at this point), and the same thing was
> concluded during the informal lunch meeting at PGcon. The point is,
> the existing SCRAM patch set can survive without touching at *all* the
> format of pg_authid. We could block SCRAM authentication when
> "password" is used in pg_hba.conf and as well as when "scram" is used
> with a plain password stored in pg_authid. Or look at the format of
> the string in the catalog if "password" is defined and decide the
> authentication protocol to follow based on that.

As I mentioned up-thread, moving forward with minimal changes to get
SCRAM in certainly makes sense, but I do think we should be open to
(and, ideally, encouraging people to work towards) having a seperate
table for verifiers with independent columns for type and verifier.

Thanks!

Stephen