Re: Spoofing as the postmaster - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: Spoofing as the postmaster
Date
Msg-id 26022.1198350516@sss.pgh.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Spoofing as the postmaster  ("Mike Rylander" <mrylander@gmail.com>)
List pgsql-hackers
"Mike Rylander" <mrylander@gmail.com> writes:
> On Dec 22, 2007 1:04 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> Hmm ... we've always thought of SSL as being primarily comm security
>> and thus useless on a Unix socket, but the mutual authentication aspect
>> could come in handy as an answer for this type of threat.  Anyone want
>> to try this and see if it really works or not?
>> 
>> Does OpenSSL have a mode where it only does mutual auth and not
>> encryption?

> miker@whirly:~$ openssl ciphers -v  'NULL'

Cool.  I took a quick look through the code, and I think that a smoke
test could be made just by diking out these lines in 
src/interfaces/libpq/fe-connect.c:
               if (IS_AF_UNIX(conn->raddr.addr.ss_family))               {                   /* Don't bother requesting
SSLover a Unix socket */                   conn->allow_ssl_try = false;               }
 

Actual support would require rather more effort --- for instance,
I doubt that the default behavior should be to try to do SSL over a
socket, so "sslmode" would need some extension, and we'd want to extend
the pg_hba.conf keywords --- but I think this would be enough to allow
verifying whether it will work.
        regards, tom lane


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