Le 19/11/2021 à 16:55, Tom Lane a écrit :
Gilles Darold <gil...@migops.com> writes:
Now that the security policy is getting stronger, it is not uncommon to
create users with a password expiration date (VALID UNTIL).
TBH, I thought people were starting to realize that forced password
rotations are a net security negative. It's true that a lot of
places haven't gotten the word yet.
I'm wondering if we might be interested in having this feature in psql?
This proposal kind of seems like a hack, because
(1) not everybody uses psql
Yes, for me it's a comfort feature. When a user connect to a PG backend
using an account that have expired you have no information that the
problem is a password expiration. The message returned to the user is
just: "FATAL: password authentication failed for user "foo". We had to
verify in the log file that the problem is related to "DETAIL: User
"foo" has an expired password.". If the user was warned beforehand to
change the password it will probably saves me some time.
(2) psql can't really tell whether rolvaliduntil is relevant.
(It can see whether the server demanded a password, but
maybe that went to LDAP or some other auth method.)
I agree, I hope that in case of external authentication rolvaliduntil is
not set and in this case I guess that there is other notification
channels to inform the user that his password will expire. Otherwise yes
the warning message could be a false positive but the rolvaliduntil can
be changed to infinity to fix this case.
That leads me to wonder about server-side solutions. It's easy
enough for the server to see that it's used a password with an
expiration N days away, but how could that be reported to the
client? The only idea that comes to mind that doesn't seem like
a protocol break is to issue a NOTICE message, which doesn't
seem like it squares with your desire to only do this interactively.
(Although I'm not sure I believe that's a great idea. If your
application breaks at 2AM because its password expired, you
won't be any happier than if your interactive sessions start to
fail. Maybe a message that would leave a trail in the server log
would be best after all.)
I think that this is the responsibility of the client to display a
warning when the password is about to expire, the backend could help the
application by sending a NOTICE but the application will still have to
report the notice. I mean that it can continue to do all the work to
verify that the password is about to expire.
Default value is 0 like today no warning at all.
Off-by-default is pretty much guaranteed to not help most people.
Right, I was thinking of backward compatibility but this does not apply
here. So default to 7 days will be better.
To sum up as I said on top this is just a comfort notification dedicated
to psql and for local pg account to avoid looking at log file for
forgetting users.
--
Gilles Darold
