Storing passwords in plaintext hasn't been a good idea for a very long
time, if ever. Now seems like a good time to finally forbid it, since we're
messing with this in PostgreSQL 10 anyway.
Remove the CREATE/ALTER USER UNENCRYPTED PASSSWORD 'foo' syntax, since
storing passwords unencrypted is no longer supported. ENCRYPTED PASSWORD
'foo' is still accepted, but ENCRYPTED is now just a noise-word, it does
the same as just PASSWORD 'foo'.
Likewise, remove the --unencrypted option from createuser, but accept
--encrypted as a no-op for backward compatibility. AFAICS, --encrypted was
a no-op even before this patch, because createuser encrypted the password
before sending it to the server even if --encrypted was not specified. It
added the ENCRYPTED keyword to the SQL command, but since the password was
already in encrypted form, it didn't make any difference. The documentation
was not clear on whether that was intended or not, but it's moot now.
Also, while password_encryption='on' is still accepted as an alias for
'md5', it is now marked as hidden, so that it is not listed as an accepted
value in error hints, for example. That's not directly related to removing
'plain', but it seems better this way.
Reviewed by Michael Paquier
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/16e9b768-fd78-0b12-cfc1-7b6b7f238fde@iki.fi
Per discussion, plain "scram" is confusing because we actually implement
SCRAM-SHA-256 rather than the original SCRAM that uses SHA-1 as the hash
algorithm. If we add support for SCRAM-SHA-512 or some other mechanism in
the SCRAM family in the future, that would become even more confusing.
Most of the internal files and functions still use just "scram" as a
shorthand for SCRMA-SHA-256, but I did change PASSWORD_TYPE_SCRAM to
PASSWORD_TYPE_SCRAM_SHA_256, as that could potentially be used by 3rd
party extensions that hook into the password-check hook.
Michael Paquier did this in an earlier version of the SCRAM patch set
already, but I didn't include that in the version that was committed.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/fde71ff1-5858-90c8-99a9-1c2427e7bafb@iki.fi
An important step of SASLprep normalization, is to convert the string to
Unicode normalization form NFKC. Unicode normalization requires a fairly
large table of character decompositions, which is generated from data
published by the Unicode consortium. The script to generate the table is
put in src/common/unicode, as well test code for the normalization.
A pre-generated version of the tables is included in src/include/common,
so you don't need the code in src/common/unicode to build PostgreSQL, only
if you wish to modify the normalization tables.
The SASLprep implementation depends on the UTF-8 functions from
src/backend/utils/mb/wchar.c. So to use it, you must also compile and link
that. That doesn't change anything for the current users of these
functions, the backend and libpq, as they both already link with wchar.o.
It would be good to move those functions into a separate file in
src/commmon, but I'll leave that for another day.
No documentation changes included, because there is no details on the
SCRAM mechanism in the docs anyway. An overview on that in the protocol
specification would probably be good, even though SCRAM is documented in
detail in RFC5802. I'll write that as a separate patch. An important thing
to mention there is that we apply SASLprep even on invalid UTF-8 strings,
to support other encodings.
Patch by Michael Paquier and me.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqSByyEmAVLtEf1KxTRh=PWNKiWKEKQR=e1yGehz=wbymQ@mail.gmail.com
If a user has a SCRAM verifier in pg_authid.rolpassword, there's no reason
we cannot attempt to perform SCRAM authentication instead of MD5. The worst
that can happen is that the client doesn't support SCRAM, and the
authentication will fail. But previously, it would fail for sure, because
we would not even try. SCRAM is strictly more secure than MD5, so there's
no harm in trying it. This allows for a more graceful transition from MD5
passwords to SCRAM, as user passwords can be changed to SCRAM verifiers
incrementally, without changing pg_hba.conf.
Refactor the code in auth.c to support that better. Notably, we now have to
look up the user's pg_authid entry before sending the password challenge,
also when performing MD5 authentication. Also simplify the concept of a
"doomed" authentication. Previously, if a user had a password, but it had
expired, we still performed SCRAM authentication (but always returned error
at the end) using the salt and iteration count from the expired password.
Now we construct a fake salt, like we do when the user doesn't have a
password or doesn't exist at all. That simplifies get_role_password(), and
we can don't need to distinguish the "user has expired password", and
"user does not exist" cases in auth.c.
On second thoughts, also rename uaSASL to uaSCRAM. It refers to the
mechanism specified in pg_hba.conf, and while we use SASL for SCRAM
authentication at the protocol level, the mechanism should be called SCRAM,
not SASL. As a comparison, we have uaLDAP, even though it looks like the
plain 'password' authentication at the protocol level.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/6425.1489506016@sss.pgh.pa.us
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier
Tests all combinations of users with MD5, plaintext and SCRAM verifiers
stored in pg_authid, with plain 'password', 'md5' and 'scram'
authentication methods.
Michael Paquier
Bruce Momjian
Andrew Dunstan
Heikki Linnakangas