Re: [pgAdmin4][Patch]- Feature #7012 - disable master password requirement when using alternative auth source

Hi

On Mon, 11 Apr 2022 at 09:20, Akshay Joshi <akshay(dot)joshi(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>
wrote:

> Thanks, the patch applied.
>
> On Mon, Apr 11, 2022 at 12:00 PM Khushboo Vashi <
> khushboo(dot)vashi(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Please find the attached patch to implement the feature #7012 - Disable
>> master password requirement when using alternative auth source
>>
>> When pgAdmin stores a connection password, it encrypts it using a key
>> that is formed either from the master password, or from the pgAdmin login
>> password for the user. In the case of auth methods such as OAuth, Kerberos
>> or Webserver, pgAdmin doesn't have access to anything long-lived to form
>> the encryption key from, hence it uses the master password. And if the
>> master is disabled, there is no way to store the connection password.
>>
>> To resolve this, we have added an option to config.py (which defaults to
>> None) for an alternate encryption key. pgAdmin would use this if a) the
>> master password is disabled AND b) there is no suitable key/password
>> available from the auth module for the user. If the option is set to
>> None, pgAdmin works as it does now.
>>
>
This change has just been brought to my attention through other work. I
think this is poorly thought out, and could easily be made much more secure
and flexible than the current design.

Instead of effectively hard-coding a master password, which is only
slightly more secure than not having one in the first place, we should
allow the user to specify the path to a script or program that will return
a key. In a security-conscious environment, the script might query a
centralised key management system to securely retrieve the key to use. If a
user really wants the less secure implementation that this current patch
offers, then a simple script as follows would offer that (but would not be
recommended):

====
#!/bin/sh

echo "my secret key"
====

We would probably also want to allow use of a placeholder in which the
username can be passed, e.g.

MASTER_ENCRYPTION_KEY_SCRIPT = '/path/to/get-key.sh %u'

--
Dave Page
Blog: https://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com