Re: Proposal: Support custom authentication methods using hooks - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Stephen Frost
Subject Re: Proposal: Support custom authentication methods using hooks
Date
Msg-id 20220316225804.GX10577@tamriel.snowman.net
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Proposal: Support custom authentication methods using hooks  (samay sharma <smilingsamay@gmail.com>)
List pgsql-hackers
Greetings,

* samay sharma (smilingsamay@gmail.com) wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 16, 2022 at 8:02 AM Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> > How about- if we just added OAUTH support directly into libpq and the
> > backend, would that work with Azure's OIDC provider?  If not, why not?
>
> Overall, Azure AD implements OIDC, so this could be doable. However, we'll
> have to explore further to see if the current implementation would satisfy
> all the requirements.

Great, would be useful to know what's discovered here and if OIDC
doesn't do what you're looking for, how you're intending to work on
improving it to make it so that it does, in an open and transparent
manner through the RFC process.

> > If it does, then what's the justification for trying to allow custom
> > backend-only authentication methods?
>
> The only goal of this patch wasn't to enable support for Azure AD. That's
> just one client. Users might have a need to add or change auth methods in
> the future and providing that extensibility so we don't need to have core
> changes for each one of them would be useful. I know there isn't alignment
> on this yet, but if we'd like to move certain auth methods out of core into
> extensions, then this might provide a good framework for that.

Hand-waving at this and saying that other people want it is not
justification for it- who else, exactly, has come along and asked for
it?  I also disagree that we actually want to move authentication
methods out of core- that was an argument brought up in this thread as
justification for why these hooks should exist but I don't see anyone
other than the folks that want the hooks actually saying that's
something they want.  There are some folks who agree that we should drop
support for certain authentication methods but that's not at all the
same thing (and no, moving them to contrib isn't somehow deprecating or
removing them from what we have to support or making it so that we don't
have to deal with them).

Thanks,

Stephen

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