Re: [PoC] Federated Authn/z with OAUTHBEARER

Jacob Champion <jchampion@timescale.com>

From: Jacob Champion <jchampion@timescale.com>
To: mahendrakar s <mahendrakarforpg@gmail.com>
Cc: "pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, "smilingsamay@gmail.com" <smilingsamay@gmail.com>, "andres@anarazel.de" <andres@anarazel.de>, anchudno@microsoft.com, mahendrakars@microsoft.com
Date: 2022-09-21T16:03:22Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →
  1. meson: Fix install-quiet after clean

  2. oauth: Run Autoconf tests with correct compiler flags

  3. Link libpq with libdl if the platform needs that.

  4. Doc: correct spelling of meson switch.

  5. oauth: Correct SSL dependency for libpq-oauth.a

  6. oauth: Fix Autoconf build on macOS

  7. oauth: Move the builtin flow into a separate module

  8. Remove a stray "pgrminclude" annotation

  9. oauth: Simplify copy of PGoauthBearerRequest

  10. oauth: Improve validator docs on interruptibility

  11. oauth: Disallow synchronous DNS in libcurl

  12. oauth: Fix postcondition for set_timer on macOS

  13. oauth: Use IPv4-only issuer in oauth_validator tests

  14. Work around OAuth/EVFILT_TIMER quirk on NetBSD.

  15. oauth: Fix incorrect const markers in struct

  16. Add missing entry to oauth_validator test .gitignore

  17. cirrus: Temporarily fix libcurl link error

  18. Add support for OAUTHBEARER SASL mechanism

  19. libpq: Handle asynchronous actions during SASL

  20. require_auth: prepare for multiple SASL mechanisms

  21. Move PG_MAX_AUTH_TOKEN_LENGTH to libpq/auth.h

  22. Make SASL max message length configurable

  23. jsonapi: fully initialize dummy lexer

  24. common/jsonapi: support libpq as a client

  25. Remove fe_memutils from libpgcommon_shlib

  26. Revert ECPG's use of pnstrdup()

  27. Explicitly require password for SCRAM exchange

  28. Refactor SASL exchange to return tri-state status

On Tue, Sep 20, 2022 at 4:19 PM Jacob Champion <jchampion@timescale.com> wrote:
> > 2.     Add support to pass on the OAuth bearer token. In this
> > obtaining the bearer token is left to 3rd party application or user.
> >
> >         ./psql -U <username> -d 'dbname=postgres
> > oauth_client_id=<client_id> oauth_bearer_token=<token>
>
> This hurts, but I think people are definitely going to ask for it, given
> the frightening practice of copy-pasting these (incredibly sensitive
> secret) tokens all over the place...

After some further thought -- in this case, you already have an opaque
Bearer token (and therefore you already know, out of band, which
provider needs to be used), you're willing to copy-paste it from
whatever service you got it from, and you have an extension plugged
into Postgres on the backend that verifies this Bearer blob using some
procedure that Postgres knows nothing about.

Why do you need the OAUTHBEARER mechanism logic at that point? Isn't
that identical to a custom password scheme? It seems like that could
be handled completely by Samay's pluggable auth proposal.

--Jacob