Horton

Re: Support for NSS as a libpq TLS backend

Jacob Champion <pchampion@vmware.com>

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From: Jacob Champion <pchampion@vmware.com>
To: "daniel@yesql.se" <daniel@yesql.se>
Cc: "hlinnaka@iki.fi" <hlinnaka@iki.fi>, "pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>, "andrew.dunstan@2ndquadrant.com" <andrew.dunstan@2ndquadrant.com>, "sfrost@snowman.net" <sfrost@snowman.net>, "thomas.munro@gmail.com" <thomas.munro@gmail.com>, "michael@paquier.xyz" <michael@paquier.xyz>, "andres@anarazel.de" <andres@anarazel.de>
Date: 2021-02-02T00:42:23Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On Mon, 2021-02-01 at 21:49 +0100, Daniel Gustafsson wrote:
> > On 29 Jan 2021, at 19:46, Jacob Champion <pchampion@vmware.com> wrote:
> > I think the bad news is that the static approach will need support for
> > ENABLE_THREAD_SAFETY.
> 
> I did some more reading today and noticed that the NSS documentation (and their
> sample code for doing crypto without TLS connections) says to use NSS_NoDB_Init
> to perform a read-only init which don't require a matching close call.  Now,
> the docs aren't terribly clear and also seems to have gone offline from MDN,
> and skimming the code isn't entirelt self-explanatory, so I may well have
> missed something.  The v24 patchset posted changes to this and at least passes
> tests with decent performance so it seems worth investigating.

Nice! Not having to close helps quite a bit.

(Looks like thread safety for NSS_Init was added in 3.13, so we have an
absolute version floor.)

> > (It looks like the NSS implementation of pgtls_close() needs some thread
> > support too?)
> 
> Storing the context in conn would probably be better?

Agreed.

> > The good(?) news is that I don't understand why OpenSSL's
> > implementation of cryptohash doesn't _also_ need the thread-safety
> > code. (Shouldn't we need to call CRYPTO_set_locking_callback() et al
> > before using any of its cryptohash implementation?) So maybe we can
> > implement the same global setup/teardown API for OpenSSL too and not
> > have to one-off it for NSS...
> 
> No idea here, wouldn't that impact pgcrypto as well in that case?

If pgcrypto is backend-only then I don't think it should need
multithreading protection; is that right?

--Jacob

Commits

  1. Add tab-completion for CREATE FOREIGN TABLE.

  2. Add tap tests for the schema publications.

  3. Move Perl test modules to a better namespace

  4. Adjust configure to insist on Perl version >= 5.8.3.

  5. Simplify code related to compilation of SSL and OpenSSL

  6. Introduce --with-ssl={openssl} as a configure option

  7. Implement support for bulk inserts in postgres_fdw

  8. Fix redundant error messages in client tools

  9. doc: Apply more consistently <productname> markup for OpenSSL

  10. Check ssl_in_use flag when reporting statistics