Horton

Re: [PoC] Federated Authn/z with OAUTHBEARER

Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>

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From: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>, Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>, Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>, Nazir Bilal Yavuz <byavuz81@gmail.com>, Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>, Antonin Houska <ah@cybertec.at>
Date: 2025-03-20T23:26:49Z
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

Hi,

On 2025-03-20 17:08:54 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> writes:
> > On Thu, Mar 20, 2025 at 01:33:26PM -0700, Jacob Champion wrote:
> >> So one question for the collective is -- putting Curl itself aside --
> >> is having a basic-but-usable OAuth flow, out of the box, worth the
> >> costs of a generic HTTP client?
> 
> > One observation is that security scanning tools are going to see the
> > curl dependency and look at any CSVs related to them and ask us, whether
> > they are using OAUTH or not.
> 
> Yes.  Also, none of this has addressed my complaint about the extent
> of the build and install dependencies.  Yes, simply not selecting
> --with-libcurl removes the problem ... but most packagers are under
> very heavy pressure to enable all features of a package.

How about we provide the current libpq.so without linking to curl and also a
libpq-oauth.so that has curl support? If we do it right libpq-oauth.so would
itself link to libpq.so, making libpq-oauth.so a fairly small library.

That way packagers can split libpq-oauth.so into a separate package, while
still just building once.

That'd be a bit of work on the buildsystem side, but it seems doable.


> From what's been said here, only a small minority of users are likely
> to have any interest in this feature.  So my answer to "is it worth
> the cost" is no, and would be no even if I had a lower estimate of
> the costs.

I think this is likely going to be rather widely used, way more widely than
e.g. kerberos or ldap support in libpq. My understanding is that there's a
fair bit of pressure in lots of companies to centralize authentication towards
centralized systems, even for server applications.


> I don't have any problem with making a solution available to those
> users who want it --- but I really do NOT want this to be part of
> stock libpq nor done as part of the core Postgres build.  I do not
> think that the costs of that have been fully accounted for, especially
> not the fact that almost all of those costs fall on people other than
> us.

I am on board with not having it as part of stock libpq, but I don't see what
we gain by not building it as part of postgres (if the dependencies are
available, of course).

Greetings,

Andres Freund