On 02/11/2015 04:38 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
Peter Eisentraut <pete...@gmx.net> writes:
On 2/10/15 8:28 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
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.

sounds like SASL

Sounds like pie in the sky really :-(.

SASL won't automatically solve any of ourproblems. We still have to write the support for all the authentication mechanisms we wanted to support. The nice thing about SASL is there is a list of well-understood and documented mechanisms that go with it, with canonical names like "SCRAM-SHA-1". If we use those, it's well-defined what the mechanism is, with less design work for us. And who knows, it just might make it easier to add client-support, if there's an existing SASL library for language X.

So +1 for implementing SASL. It's simple to implement, and AFAICS isn't any more difficult than rolling our own.

 We could make the server turn on
a dime perhaps, but the client-side population will not come along nearly
that quickly, nor with small effort.  Stored passwords won't migrate to a
new scheme transparently either.

Yep.

I think it's probably reasonable to think about a more modern password
auth method, but not to imagine that it will be pluggable or that the
adoption time for any revision will be less than years long.

It makes sense to make it pluggable if it's simple, but in reality most drivers will support only a few most common mechanisms. That's OK. We need to design the protocol so that multiple mechanisms can be used side-by-side for years.

- Heikki



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