Horton

Re: [PoC] Federated Authn/z with OAUTHBEARER

Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>

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From: Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>
To: Jacob Champion <jchampion@timescale.com>
Cc: mahendrakar s <mahendrakarforpg@gmail.com>, Andrey Chudnovsky <achudnovskij@gmail.com>, hlinnaka@iki.fi, Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, smilingsamay@gmail.com
Date: 2023-02-23T18:47:55Z
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

Greetings,

* Jacob Champion (jchampion@timescale.com) wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 20, 2023 at 2:35 PM Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> > Having skimmed back through this thread again, I still feel that the
> > direction that was originally being taken (actually support something in
> > libpq and the backend, be it with libiddawc or something else or even
> > our own code, and not just throw hooks in various places) makes a lot
> > more sense and is a lot closer to how Kerberos and client-side certs and
> > even LDAP auth work today.
> 
> Cool, that helps focus the effort. Thanks!

Great, glad to hear that.

> > That also seems like a much better answer
> > for our users when it comes to new authentication methods than having
> > extensions and making libpq developers have to write their own custom
> > code, not to mention that we'd still need to implement something in psql
> > to provide such a hook if we are to have psql actually usefully exercise
> > this, no?
> 
> I don't mind letting clients implement their own flows... as long as
> it's optional. So even if we did use a hook in the end, I agree that
> we've got to exercise it ourselves.

This really doesn't feel like a great area to try and do hooks or
similar in, not the least because that approach has been tried and tried
again (PAM, GSSAPI, SASL would all be examples..) and frankly none of
them has turned out great (which is why we can't just tell people "well,
install the pam_oauth2 and watch everything work!") and this strikes me
as trying to do that yet again but worse as it's not even a dedicated
project trying to solve the problem but more like a side project.  SCRAM
was good, we've come a long way thanks to that, this feels like it
should be more in line with that rather than trying to invent yet
another new "generic" set of hooks/APIs that will just cause DBAs and
our users headaches trying to make work.

> > In the Kerberos test suite we have today, we actually bring up a proper
> > Kerberos server, set things up, and then test end-to-end installing a
> > keytab for the server, getting a TGT, getting a service ticket, testing
> > authentication and encryption, etc.  Looking around, it seems like the
> > equivilant would perhaps be to use Glewlwyd and libiddawc or libcurl and
> > our own code to really be able to test this and show that it works and
> > that we're doing it correctly, and to let us know if we break something.
> 
> The original patchset includes a test server in Python -- a major
> advantage being that you can test the client and server independently
> of each other, since the implementation is so asymmetric. Additionally
> testing against something like Glewlwyd would be a great way to stack
> coverage. (If we *only* test against a packaged server, though, it'll
> be harder to test our stuff in the presence of malfunctions and other
> corner cases.)

Oh, that's even better- I agree entirely that having test code that can
be instructed to return specific errors so that we can test that our
code responds properly is great (and is why pgbackrest has things like
a stub'd out libpq, fake s3, GCS, and Azure servers, and more) and would
certainly want to keep that, even if we also build out a test that uses
a real server to provide integration testing with not-our-code too.

Thanks!

Stephen