Re: [PoC] Federated Authn/z with OAUTHBEARER

On Mon, Feb 20, 2023 at 2:35 PM Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> Having skimmed back through this thread again, I still feel that the
> direction that was originally being taken (actually support something in
> libpq and the backend, be it with libiddawc or something else or even
> our own code, and not just throw hooks in various places) makes a lot
> more sense and is a lot closer to how Kerberos and client-side certs and
> even LDAP auth work today.

Cool, that helps focus the effort. Thanks!

> That also seems like a much better answer
> for our users when it comes to new authentication methods than having
> extensions and making libpq developers have to write their own custom
> code, not to mention that we'd still need to implement something in psql
> to provide such a hook if we are to have psql actually usefully exercise
> this, no?

I don't mind letting clients implement their own flows... as long as
it's optional. So even if we did use a hook in the end, I agree that
we've got to exercise it ourselves.

> In the Kerberos test suite we have today, we actually bring up a proper
> Kerberos server, set things up, and then test end-to-end installing a
> keytab for the server, getting a TGT, getting a service ticket, testing
> authentication and encryption, etc. Looking around, it seems like the
> equivilant would perhaps be to use Glewlwyd and libiddawc or libcurl and
> our own code to really be able to test this and show that it works and
> that we're doing it correctly, and to let us know if we break something.

The original patchset includes a test server in Python -- a major
advantage being that you can test the client and server independently
of each other, since the implementation is so asymmetric. Additionally
testing against something like Glewlwyd would be a great way to stack
coverage. (If we *only* test against a packaged server, though, it'll
be harder to test our stuff in the presence of malfunctions and other
corner cases.)

Thanks,
--Jacob