Most of the improvements were in the new SCRAM code:
* In SCRAM protocol violation messages, use errdetail to provide the
details.
* If pg_backend_random() fails, throw an ERROR rather than just LOG. We
shouldn't continue authentication if we can't generate a random nonce.
* Use ereport() rather than elog() for the "invalid SCRAM verifier"
messages. They shouldn't happen, if everything works, but it's not
inconceivable that someone would have invalid scram verifiers in
pg_authid, e.g. if a broken client application was used to generate the
verifier.
But this change applied to old code:
* Use ERROR rather than COMMERROR for protocol violation errors. There's
no reason to not tell the client what they did wrong. The client might be
confused already, so that it cannot read and display the error correctly,
but let's at least try. In the "invalid password packet size" case, we
used to actually continue with authentication anyway, but that is now a
hard error.
Patch by Michael Paquier and me. Thanks to Daniel Varrazzo for spotting
the typo in one of the messages that spurred the discussion and these
larger changes.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CA%2Bmi_8aZYLhuyQi1Jo0hO19opNZ2OEATEOM5fKApH7P6zTOZGg%40mail.gmail.com
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
In the backend, this is just to silence coverity warnings, but in the
frontend, it's a genuine leak, even if extremely rare.
Spotted by Coverity, patch by Michael Paquier.
* Remove is_scram_verifier() function. It was unused.
* Fix sanitize_char() function, used in error messages on protocol
violations, to print bytes >= 0x7F correctly.
* Change spelling of scram_MockSalt() function to be more consistent with
the surroundings.
* Change a few more references to "server proof" to "server signature" that
I missed in commit d981074c24.
Instead, send the same FATAL message as with other password-based
authentication mechanisms. This gives a more user-friendly message:
psql: FATAL: password authentication failed for user "test"
instead of:
psql: error received from server in SASL exchange: invalid-proof
Even before this patch, the server sent that FATAL message, after the
SCRAM-specific "e=invalid-proof" message. But libpq would stop at the
SCRAM error message, and not process the ErrorResponse that would come
after that. We could've taught libpq to check for an ErrorResponse after
failed authentication, but it's simpler to modify the server to send only
the ErrorResponse. The SCRAM specification allows for aborting the
authentication at any point, using an application-defined error mechanism,
like PostgreSQL's ErrorResponse. Using the e=invalid-proof message is
optional.
Reported by Jeff Janes.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAMkU%3D1w3jQ53M1OeNfN8Cxd9O%2BA_9VONJivTbYoYRRdRsLT6vA@mail.gmail.com
* Move computation of SaltedPassword to a separate function from
scram_ClientOrServerKey(). This saves a lot of cycles in libpq, by
computing SaltedPassword only once per authentication. (Computing
SaltedPassword is expensive by design.)
* Split scram_ClientOrServerKey() into two functions. Improves
readability, by making the calling code less verbose.
* Rename "server proof" to "server signature", to better match the
nomenclature used in RFC 5802.
* Rename SCRAM_SALT_LEN to SCRAM_DEFAULT_SALT_LEN, to make it more clear
that the salt can be of any length, and the constant only specifies how
long a salt we use when we generate a new verifier. Also rename
SCRAM_ITERATIONS_DEFAULT to SCRAM_DEFAULT_ITERATIONS, for consistency.
These things caught my eye while working on other upcoming changes.
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
This contains some protocol changes to SASL authentiation (which is new
in v10):
* For future-proofing, in the AuthenticationSASL message that begins SASL
authentication, provide a list of SASL mechanisms that the server
supports, for the client to choose from. Currently, it's always just
SCRAM-SHA-256.
* Add a separate authentication message type for the final server->client
SASL message, which the client doesn't need to respond to. This makes
it unambiguous whether the client is supposed to send a response or not.
The SASL mechanism should know that anyway, but better to be explicit.
Also, in the server, support clients that don't send an Initial Client
response in the first SASLInitialResponse message. The server is supposed
to first send an empty request in that case, to which the client will
respond with the data that usually comes in the Initial Client Response.
libpq uses the Initial Client Response field and doesn't need this, and I
would assume any other sensible implementation to use Initial Client
Response, too, but let's follow the SASL spec.
Improve the documentation on SASL authentication in protocol. Add a
section describing the SASL message flow, and some details on our
SCRAM-SHA-256 implementation.
Document the different kinds of PasswordMessages that the frontend sends
in different phases of SASL authentication, as well as GSS/SSPI
authentication as separate message formats. Even though they're all 'p'
messages, and the exact format depends on the context, describing them as
separate message formats makes the documentation more clear.
Reviewed by Michael Paquier and Álvaro Hernández Tortosa.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqS-aFg0iM3AQOJwKDv_0WkAedRjs1W2X8EixSz+sKBXCQ@mail.gmail.com
Free each SASL message after sending it. It's not a lot of wasted memory,
and it's short-lived, but the authentication code in general tries to
pfree() stuff, so let's follow the example.
Adding the pfree() revealed a little bug in build_server_first_message().
It attempts to keeps a copy of the sent message, but it was missing a
pstrdup(), so the pointer started to dangle, after adding the pfree()
into CheckSCRAMAuth().
Reword comments and debug messages slightly, while we're at it.
Reviewed by Michael Paquier.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/6490b975-5ee1-6280-ac1d-af975b19fb9a@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
It was not used for what the comment claimed, at all. It was actually used
as the 'base' argument to strtol(), when reading the iteration count. We
don't need a constant for base-10, so remove it.
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
This introduces a new generic SASL authentication method, similar to the
GSS and SSPI methods. The server first tells the client which SASL
authentication mechanism to use, and then the mechanism-specific SASL
messages are exchanged in AuthenticationSASLcontinue and PasswordMessage
messages. Only SCRAM-SHA-256 is supported at the moment, but this allows
adding more SASL mechanisms in the future, without changing the overall
protocol.
Support for channel binding, aka SCRAM-SHA-256-PLUS is left for later.
The SASLPrep algorithm, for pre-processing the password, is not yet
implemented. That could cause trouble, if you use a password with
non-ASCII characters, and a client library that does implement SASLprep.
That will hopefully be added later.
Authorization identities, as specified in the SCRAM-SHA-256 specification,
are ignored. SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION provides more or less the same
functionality, anyway.
If a user doesn't exist, perform a "mock" authentication, by constructing
an authentic-looking challenge on the fly. The challenge is derived from
a new system-wide random value, "mock authentication nonce", which is
created at initdb, and stored in the control file. We go through these
motions, in order to not give away the information on whether the user
exists, to unauthenticated users.
Bumps PG_CONTROL_VERSION, because of the new field in control file.
Patch by Michael Paquier and Heikki Linnakangas, reviewed at different
stages by Robert Haas, Stephen Frost, David Steele, Aleksander Alekseev,
and many others.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqRbR3GmFYdedCAhzukfKrgBLTLtMvENOmPrVWREsZkF8g%40mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqSMXU35g%3DW9X74HVeQp0uvgJxvYOuA4A-A3M%2B0wfEBv-w%40mail.gmail.com
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/55192AFE.6080106@iki.fi