On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 10:05:25AM -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote: > Agreed. The problem was so glaring that I assumed I was not > understanding it. I have modified this email subject so users will > hopefully read back in this thread to see the details.
Okay, let's use this new thread then for the follow-up discussion. For people wondering, this basically refers to the following message from Bruce and Heikki: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/d01b31f5-0b3e-b69a-1504-a79649d81...@iki.fi There are actually two problems which have been touched in this discussion: 1) A client using libpq may be forced by a rogue server to not use channel binding even if it is willing to do so. For example, a v11 libpq with a v10 server enters in this category. An idea here would be to provide an extra connection parameter which allows the client to reject an access to a server if channel binding is not supported. One idea is something I mentioned here: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20180516115923.GB14835%40paquier.xyz So we could have channel_binding_mode, which has a 'prefer' mode, which is the actual default we have in the tree, as well as a 'require' mode, which allows the client to fail connection if a server does not publish the SCRAM-PLUS mechanism after the initial authentication message exchange. 2) Allow clients to connect to servers only if they use channel binding. This goes with a server-side hba configuration, like scram-sha-256-plus to not allow access to clients in a SCRAM authentication if they don't have channel binding support. From a security point of view, 1) is important for libpq, but I am not much enthusiast about 2) as a whole. The backend has proper support for channel binding, hence other drivers speaking the protocol could have their own restriction mechanisms. I actually touched a bit what's being discussed here as part of the channel binding thread: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqTRW9qbPSYpWtKJD9A%2BQBd6dS0ePkgrrjbkkG0C10zsBA%40mail.gmail.com However per what I read this does not cover the need to allow the client to allow that channel binding *has* to be used depending on its requirements. I'd like to mention as well that I touched the topic during the unconference of PGConf Asia last December: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PGConf.ASIA2017_Developer_Unconference#SCRAM_improvements Any ideas raised there did not get much enthusiam from the participants. Magnus and Bruce have participated in the conference, perhaps you were not at my unconf session.. -- Michael
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