Re: [PoC] Federated Authn/z with OAUTHBEARER

On Tue, Sep 20, 2022 at 4:19 PM Jacob Champion <jchampion(at)timescale(dot)com> wrote:
> > 2. Add support to pass on the OAuth bearer token. In this
> > obtaining the bearer token is left to 3rd party application or user.
> >
> > ./psql -U <username> -d 'dbname=postgres
> > oauth_client_id=<client_id> oauth_bearer_token=<token>
>
> This hurts, but I think people are definitely going to ask for it, given
> the frightening practice of copy-pasting these (incredibly sensitive
> secret) tokens all over the place...

After some further thought -- in this case, you already have an opaque
Bearer token (and therefore you already know, out of band, which
provider needs to be used), you're willing to copy-paste it from
whatever service you got it from, and you have an extension plugged
into Postgres on the backend that verifies this Bearer blob using some
procedure that Postgres knows nothing about.

Why do you need the OAUTHBEARER mechanism logic at that point? Isn't
that identical to a custom password scheme? It seems like that could
be handled completely by Samay's pluggable auth proposal.

--Jacob