On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 7:32 PM, Peter Geoghegan <p...@heroku.com> wrote: > On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 4:21 PM, Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Although the patch was described as relatively easy to write, it never >> went anywhere, because it *replaced* MD5 authentication with bcrypt, >> which would be a big problem for existing clients. It seems clear >> that we should add something new and not immediately kill off what >> we've already got, so that people can transition smoothly. An idea I >> just had today is to keep using basically the same system that we are >> currently using for MD5, but with a stronger hash algorithm, like >> SHA-1 or SHA-2 (which includes SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and >> SHA-512). Those are slower, but my guess is that even SHA-512 is not >> enough slower for anybody to care very much, and if they do, well >> that's another reason to make use of the new stuff optional. > > I believe that a big advantage of bcrypt for authentication is the > relatively high memory requirements. This frustrates GPU based > attacks.
I don't actually care which algorithm we use, and I dowannahafta care. What I do want to do is provide a framework so that, when somebody discovers that X is better than Y because Z, somebody who knows about cryptography and not much about PostgreSQL ca add support for X in a relatively small number of lines of code. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
