Re: Postgres: pg_hba.conf, md5, pg_shadow, encrypted passwords

[Josh Berkus <josh@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

David, Stephen,

> I noted that this was a problem back in August, 2002:
>
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-admin/2002-08/msg00253.php
>
> Then, as now, the developers weren't very concerned.

Well, from our perspective, a random salt only protects against a very narrow 
range of attack types -- ones in which the attacker already has access to the 
physical database and wants to reverse-engineer user's passwords.  We'd be 
much more interested in the implementation of more/better authentication 
mechanisms.   See follow-up dicussion on pgsql-hackers.

Of course, if either of you *wrote* a random-salt patch for PostgreSQL, psql 
and libpq, then that would be a different story.   I don't know that anyone 
has anything *against* a random salt.   It's just not nearly as useful as, 
for example, implementing SHA1.

-- 
--Josh

Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco