Proposal: allow non-masked IPs inside of pg_hba.conf

From: Greg Sabino Mullane <htamfids(at)gmail(dot)com>
To: pgsql-hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Proposal: allow non-masked IPs inside of pg_hba.conf
Date: 2025-02-11 20:04:51
Message-ID: CAKAnmmLUQpbkLDN-P142sx8QcqwKZOsQfE+bUf3WmEF9b-gf6Q@mail.gmail.com
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Currently, all IP addresses in the address field of records in the
pg_hba.conf file require a CIDR mask. This means that rather than the
intuitive way to add a single IP address:

host postgres alice 10.128.0.10 scram-sha-256

One must do:

host postgres alice 10.128.0.10/32 scram-sha-256

I'd like to relax that requirement, such that a lack of an explicit mask
defaults to a /32 mask, allowing that first example to work as most people
would expect. Many Postgres users are not aware of why a /32 is needed (and
what it means), and simply copy and paste. Worse, they sometimes paste the
wrong mask. An issue I've seen is to say /0 when they mean a /32 (which is
really bad from a security perspective - see nearby thread for a patch to
prevent that).

Another problem with the mask requirement is that currently a failure to
add a mask means we scan the method as the mask (!), and give a very
unhelpful error message like this:

LOG: invalid IP mask "scram-sha-256": Name or service not known

Having a default of /32 is very common among many other programs and
systems (e.g. ssh, iptables, cftable, nginx, haproxy, docker). While there
are a few ancient networking programs that default to /24, they are the
exception, and this change will fail in a secure direction.

This should have no backwards compatibility issues, as we do not currently
allow non-masks, and we are defaulting to the strictest mask. Of course,
ipv6 will default to /128

Cheers,
Greg

--
Crunchy Data - https://www.crunchydata.com
Enterprise Postgres Software Products & Tech Support

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