Re: GSSAPI and V2 protocol

On Tue, 5 Feb 2008, Tom Lane wrote:

> The problem seems to be that AuthenticationGSSContinue messages carry
> a variable-length payload, and the V2 protocol doesn't really cope with
> that because it doesn't have a message length word.
>
> 1. If the GSSContinue payload is self-identifying about its length,
> qwe could teach fe-connect.c how to determine that.

The GSS data is supposed to be opaque to the caller, so this doesn't
seem likely or a good idea.

> 2. We could retroactively redefine the contents of
> AuthenticationGSSContinue as carrying a length word after the
> authentication type code, but only in V2 protocol (so as not to break
> existing working cases). This is pretty ugly but certainly possible.

I see no harm in doing this. What's there now can't work and the change
is self contained. Is there any problem with the password message taking
a "String" datatype instead of Byte[n] with a null byte?

Kris Jurka