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

On Fri, Apr 22, 2022 at 2:01 PM Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> wrote:

> 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'
>
> Sounds good to me.
Does this mean we are going to remove the current implementation which
offers a hard-coded master password?

> --
> Dave Page
> Blog: https://pgsnake.blogspot.com
> Twitter: @pgsnake
>
> EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com
>
>