Re: WIP: SCRAM authentication

On 08/07/2015 09:26 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> Maybe I'm chiming in too late here but I am sorta unimpressed by this.
> If the user's password is stored both MD5-hashed and hashed some other
> way in the system catalogs, that's less secure than storing it in the
> least secure of those ways. And I'm afraid that if we introduce this
> new mechanism, we won't really gain any security, because everybody
> will just pg_dump or pg_upgrade and the old passwords will stick
> around in the system forever. In fact we might lose security if
> somebody changes one password verifier but doesn't realize that the
> other one is still floating around, memorializing the old password,
> and still available to be used for login.

Yeah, that's certainly a risk. You wouldn't want to keep around
verifiers for authentication methods you don't use.

> I think we should look for a solution that either (a) allows SCRAM
> authentication without requiring any changes to the contents of
> pg_authid, like what Heikki proposed before; or (b) forces a hard
> break, where at each password change you can decide if you want the
> old or new format (probably based on the current value of some
> compatibility GUC).

Yeah, something to force a hard break when you want it would be really
good. Perhaps a command you can run to remove all MD5 hashes, or at
least find all the roles that have them. And a GUC to disallow creating
new ones.

- Heikki