Re: [PATCH v20] GSSAPI encryption support

Greetings,

On Tue, Apr 2, 2019 at 18:10 Peter Eisentraut <
peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:

> On 2019-02-23 17:27, Stephen Frost wrote:
> >> About pg_hba.conf: The "hostgss" keyword seems a bit confusing. It only
> >> applies to encrypted gss-using connections, not all of them. Maybe
> >> "hostgssenc" or "hostgsswrap"?
> > Not quite sure what you mean here, but 'hostgss' seems to be quite well
> > in-line with what we do for SSL... as in, we have 'hostssl', we don't
> > say 'hostsslenc'. I feel like I'm just not understanding what you mean
> > by "not all of them".
>
> Reading the latest patch, I think this is still a bit confusing.
> Consider an entry like
>
> hostgss all all 0.0.0.0/0 gss
>
> The "hostgss" part means, the connection is GSS-*encrypted*. The "gss"
> entry in the last column means use gss for *authentication*. But didn't
> "hostgss" already imply that? No. I understand what's going on, but it
> seems quite confusing. They both just say "gss"; you have to know a lot
> about the nuances of pg_hba.conf processing to get that.
>
> If you have line like
>
> hostgss all all 0.0.0.0/0 md5
>
> it is not obvious that this means, if GSS-encrypted, use md5. It could
> just as well mean, if GSS-authenticated, use md5.
>
> The analogy with SSL is such that we use "hostssl" for connections using
> SSL encryption and "cert" for the authentication method. So there we
> use two different words for two different aspects of SSL.

I don’t view it as confusing, but I’ll change it to hostgssenc as was
suggested earlier to address that concern. It’s a bit wordy but if it
helps reduce confusion then that’s a good thing.

Thanks,

Stephen

>