Some authentication methods allowed it, others did not. In the client-side,
libpq does not even try to authenticate with an empty password, which makes
using empty passwords hazardous: an administrator might think that an
account with an empty password cannot be used to log in, because psql
doesn't allow it, and not realize that a different client would in fact
allow it. To clear that confusion and to be be consistent, disallow empty
passwords in all authentication methods.
All the authentication methods that used plaintext authentication over the
wire, except for BSD authentication, already checked that the password
received from the user was not empty. To avoid forgetting it in the future
again, move the check to the recv_password_packet function. That only
forbids using an empty password with plaintext authentication, however.
MD5 and SCRAM need a different fix:
* In stable branches, check that the MD5 hash stored for the user does not
not correspond to an empty string. This adds some overhead to MD5
authentication, because the server needs to compute an extra MD5 hash, but
it is not noticeable in practice.
* In HEAD, modify CREATE and ALTER ROLE to clear the password if an empty
string, or a password hash that corresponds to an empty string, is
specified. The user-visible behavior is the same as in the stable branches,
the user cannot log in, but it seems better to stop the empty password from
entering the system in the first place. Secondly, it is fairly expensive to
check that a SCRAM hash doesn't correspond to an empty string, because
computing a SCRAM hash is much more expensive than an MD5 hash by design,
so better avoid doing that on every authentication.
We could clear the password on CREATE/ALTER ROLE also in stable branches,
but we would still need to check at authentication time, because even if we
prevent empty passwords from being stored in pg_authid, there might be
existing ones there already.
Reported by Jeroen van der Ham, Ben de Graaff and Jelte Fennema.
Security: CVE-2017-7546
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
The salt is stored base64-encoded. With the old 10 bytes raw length, it was
always padded to 16 bytes after encoding. We might as well use 12 raw bytes
for the salt, and it's still encoded into 16 bytes.
Similarly for the random nonces, use a raw length that's divisible by 3, so
that there's no padding after base64 encoding. Make the nonces longer while
we're at it. 10 bytes was probably enough to prevent replay attacks, but
there's no reason to be skimpy here.
Per suggestion from Álvaro Hernández Tortosa.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/df8c6e27-4d8e-5281-96e5-131a4e638fc8@8kdata.com
It doesn't make any immediate difference to PostgreSQL, but might as well
follow the standard, since one exists. (I looked at RFC 5803 earlier, but
didn't fully understand it back then.)
The new format uses Base64 instead of hex to encode StoredKey and
ServerKey, which makes the verifiers slightly smaller. Using the same
encoding for the salt and the keys also means that you only need one
encoder/decoder instead of two. Although we have code in the backend to
do both, we are talking about teaching libpq how to create SCRAM verifiers
for PQencodePassword(), and libpq doesn't currently have any code for hex
encoding.
Bump catversion, because this renders any existing SCRAM verifiers in
pg_authid invalid.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/351ba574-85ea-d9b8-9689-8c928dd0955d@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
Heikki Linnakangas