Re: [PoC] Federated Authn/z with OAUTHBEARER - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Fri, 2021-06-18 at 11:31 +0300, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> On 08/06/2021 19:37, Jacob Champion wrote:
> > We've been working on ways to expand the list of third-party auth
> > methods that Postgres provides. Some example use cases might be "I want
> > to let anyone with a Google account read this table" or "let anyone who
> > belongs to this GitHub organization connect as a superuser".
> 
> Cool!

Glad you think so! :D

> > The iddawc dependency for client-side OAuth was extremely helpful to
> > develop this proof of concept quickly, but I don't think it would be an
> > appropriate component to build a real feature on. It's extremely
> > heavyweight -- it incorporates a huge stack of dependencies, including
> > a logging framework and a web server, to implement features we would
> > probably never use -- and it's fairly difficult to debug in practice.
> > If a device authorization flow were the only thing that libpq needed to
> > support natively, I think we should just depend on a widely used HTTP
> > client, like libcurl or neon, and implement the minimum spec directly
> > against the existing test suite.
> 
> You could punt and let the application implement that stuff. I'm 
> imagining that the application code would look something like this:
> 
> conn = PQconnectStartParams(...);
> for (;;)
> {
>      status = PQconnectPoll(conn)
>      switch (status)
>      {
>          case CONNECTION_SASL_TOKEN_REQUIRED:
>              /* open a browser for the user, get token */
>              token = open_browser()
>              PQauthResponse(token);
>              break;
>          ...
>      }
> }

I was toying with the idea of having a callback for libpq clients,
where they could take full control of the OAuth flow if they wanted to.
Doing it inline with PQconnectPoll seems like it would work too. It has
a couple of drawbacks that I can see:

- If a client isn't currently using a poll loop, they'd have to switch
to one to be able to use OAuth connections. Not a difficult change, but
considering all the other hurdles to making this work, I'm hoping to
minimize the hoop-jumping.

- A client would still have to receive a bunch of OAuth parameters from
some new libpq API in order to construct the correct URL to visit, so
the overall complexity for implementers might be higher than if we just
passed those params directly in a callback.

> It would be nice to have a simple default implementation, though, for 
> psql and all the other client applications that come with PostgreSQL itself.

I agree. I think having a bare-bones implementation in libpq itself
would make initial adoption *much* easier, and then if specific
applications wanted to have richer control over an authorization flow,
then they could implement that themselves with the aforementioned
callback.

The Device Authorization flow was the most minimal working
implementation I could find, since it doesn't require a web browser on
the system, just the ability to print a prompt to the console. But if
anyone knows of a better flow for this use case, I'm all ears.

> > If you've read this far, thank you for your interest, and I hope you
> > enjoy playing with it!
> 
> A few small things caught my eye in the backend oauth_exchange function:
> 
> > +       /* Handle the client's initial message. */
> > +       p = strdup(input);
> 
> this strdup() should be pstrdup().

Thanks, I'll fix that in the next re-roll.

> In the same function, there are a bunch of reports like this:
> 
> >                    ereport(ERROR,
> > +                          (errcode(ERRCODE_PROTOCOL_VIOLATION),
> > +                           errmsg("malformed OAUTHBEARER message"),
> > +                           errdetail("Comma expected, but found character \"%s\".",
> > +                                     sanitize_char(*p))));
> 
> I don't think the double quotes are needed here, because sanitize_char 
> will return quotes if it's a single character. So it would end up 
> looking like this: ... found character "'x'".

I'll fix this too. Thanks!

--Jacob