Josh Elser wrote:
I spent some time hacking on this today.
First off, this is only relevant for HTTP Basic authentication as to
perform this kind of authentication check against the underlying
database, the password needs to be in a recoverable form (e.g.
base64/obfuscated). If this isn't the case, then the Avatica server
cannot check the password against the backend database.
Along the same lines, trying to implement HTTP Digest authentication
against the backend database is impossible because the server doesn't
have access to the real password.
This entire experiment has made me question what we're really trying to
solve here. The requested scenario from Samarth and Julian are
ultimately just acting as a fail-fast and sending an HTTP 401 or 403
response (instead of Avatica's general ErrorResponse). I'm feeling like
this might need to go back to the drawing board and lay out some clear
requirements for why Avatica should provide user-password authentication
and benefit Avatica would be providing to the client that isn't already
in place.
Chewing on this point some more: applying HTTP-level authentication
which delegates to the database seems wholly duplicative to me. The only
relevant scenario I can come up with for HTTP-level authentication which
adds some value is when we are *not* using the database for any user
authentication.
As such, I'm leaning towards Avatica acting as a "database proxy" (in
the sense of something like Apache Knox's gateway would do, how we got
here in the first place), in which it *can* require its own set of
credentials for a user to access it that are disjoint from the database.
Josh Elser wrote:
So it looks like Jetty's JDBCLoginService[1] simply takes configuration
to read tables from a given JDBC driver to extract users+passwords and
roles for those users. This doesn't actually hook into the database's
authentication system. Best as I've been able to find, there is no
generic API provided by JDBC which Avatica could leverage.
Maybe it's possible to create our own LoginService (so we can use
Jetty's built-in security support) which instantiates a Connection with
the Avatica client's user/password. I'm worried about the overhead of
repeatedly doing this, though.
[1] https://wiki.eclipse.org/Jetty/Tutorial/Realms#JDBCLoginService
