By skipping SSLRequest, you can eliminate one round-trip when
establishing a TLS connection. It is also more friendly to generic TLS
proxies that don't understand the PostgreSQL protocol.
This is disabled by default in libpq, because the direct TLS handshake
will fail with old server versions. It can be enabled with the
sslnegotation=direct option. It will still fall back to the negotiated
TLS handshake if the server rejects the direct attempt, either because
it is an older version or the server doesn't support TLS at all, but
the fallback can be disabled with the sslnegotiation=requiredirect
option.
Author: Greg Stark, Heikki Linnakangas
Reviewed-by: Matthias van de Meent, Jacob Champion
The new "log_connection_negotiation" server option causes the server
to print messages to the log when it receives a SSLRequest or
GSSENCRequest packet from the client. Together with "log_connections",
it gives a trace of how a connection and encryption is
negotiatated. Use the option in the libpq_encryption test, to verify
in more detail how libpq negotiates encryption with different
gssencmode and sslmode options.
This revealed a couple of cases where libpq retries encryption or
authentication, when it should already know that it cannot succeed. I
marked them with XXX comments in the test tables. They only happen
when the connection was going to fail anyway, and only with rare
combinations of options, so they're not serious.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAEze2Wja8VUoZygCepwUeiCrWa4jP316k0mvJrOW4PFmWP0Tcw@mail.gmail.com
Heikki Linnakangas