Re: Proposal: Support custom authentication methods using hooks

On Thu, 2022-03-03 at 11:12 +0100, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> At the moment, it is not possible to judge whether the hook interface
> you have chosen is appropriate.
>
> I suggest you actually implement the Azure provider, then make the hook
> interface, and then show us both and we can see what to do with it.

To add a data point here, I've rebased my OAUTHBEARER experiment [1] on
top of this patchset. (That should work with Azure's OIDC provider, and
if it doesn't, I'd like to know why.)

After the port, here are the changes I still needed to carry in the
backend to get the tests passing:

- I needed to add custom HBA options to configure the provider.
- I needed to declare usermap support so that my provider could
actually use check_usermap().
- I had to modify the SASL mechanism registration to allow a custom
maximum message length, but I think that's not the job of Samay's
proposal to fix; it's just a needed improvement to CheckSASLAuth().

Obviously, the libpq frontend still needs to understand how to speak
the new SASL mechanism. There are third-party SASL implementations that
are plugin-based, which could potentially ease the pain here, at the
expense of a major dependency and a very new distribution model.

--Jacob

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/d1b467a78e0e36ed85a09adf979d04cf124a9d4b.camel%40vmware.com