Re: WIP: SCRAM authentication

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 10:51 AM, Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> * Tom Lane (tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us) wrote:
>> Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> writes:
>> > Why do we need pg_shadow or pg_user or related views at all..?
>>
>> A lot of code looks at those just to get usernames. I am not in favor of
>> breaking such stuff without need.
>
> Alright.
>
>> How about we just say that the password in these old views always reads
>> out as '********' even when there is a password, and we invent new views
>> that carry real auth information? (Hopefully in an extensible way.)
>
> I'd be alright with that approach, I'd just rather that any clients
> which actually want to read the password field be updated to look at the
> extensible and sensible base catalogs, and not some hacked up array that
> we shoved into that field.

Well, then let's mask it, and just have pg_auth_verifiers. Another
possible problem that I can see with this patch is what do we do with
valid_until? The last set of patches sent did not switch this field to
be per-verifier settable. I would consider a saner approach to keep
things simple and still do that. Allowing multiple verifiers per
protocol is a problem, and having a solution for it would be nice.
Should this be prioritized before having more protocols like SCRAM?

FWIW, browsing through pgbouncer, it has a look at pg_shadow for
user's password to build a basic configuration file.

(My mistake, while pg_user is world-readable, that's not the case of pg_shadow).
--
Michael