On Fri, Jul 15, 2016 at 5:10 AM, Peter Eisentraut < peter.eisentr...@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> On 7/13/16 4:11 PM, Robert Haas wrote: > > On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 3:42 AM, Magnus Hagander <mag...@hagander.net> > wrote: > >> You would think so. > >> > >> The default mode of "prefer" is ridiculous in a lot of ways. If you are > >> using SSL in any shape or form you should simply not use "prefer". > That's > >> really the only answer at this point, unfortunately. > > > > Suppose we changed the default to "require". How crazy would that be? > > If we think that that is appropriate, should we not also change the > default pg_hba.conf to hostssl lines? > > I'm not convinced either of these would go over well. > It would actually, IMO, make more sense to change the default pg_hba lines and not change the client settings... But I'm not sure either of those would go over well. > > The original complaint was not actually that "prefer" is a bad default, > but that in the presence of a root certificate on the client, a > certificate validation failure falls back to plain text. That seems > like a design flaw of the "prefer" mode, no matter whether it is the > default or not. > The entire "prefer" mode is a design flaw, that we unfortunately picked as default mode. If it fails *for any reason*, it falls back to plaintext. Thus, you have to assume it will make a plaintext connection. Thus, it gives you zero guarantees, so it serves no actual purpose from a security perspective. it will equally fall back on incompatible SSL configs. Or on a network hiccup. The presence of the certificate is just one of many different scenarios where it will fall back. If you care about encryption, you should pick something else (require/verify). If you don't care about encryption, you should pick something else (allow, probably) so as not to pay unnecessary overhead. -- Magnus Hagander Me: http://www.hagander.net/ Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/
