Re: Bad security practice in oid2name and pgbench

Tom Lane wrote:
> While going through the contrib documentation, I notice that both
> oid2name and pgbench allow specifying a password on the command line,
> ie
> -P password
>
> This is known to be horribly bad security practice (because the password
> is exposed to everyone else on the machine), and we don't allow any of
> our standard applications to do it. Why is contrib getting a free pass?
>
> I think we should fix these two programs to work the same as our
> other apps, ie, interactively prompt for password when needed.
>
>

Maybe we should also refuse to take passwords from conninfo strings
passed as dbname params, for the same reason. Probably the simplest way
would be add a flag to the arguments to
libpq/fe-connect.c::connectOptions1() to indicate whether or not to get
the password out of the string.

cheers

andrew