Re: Bad security practice in oid2name and pgbench - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Andrew Dunstan
Subject Re: Bad security practice in oid2name and pgbench
Date
Msg-id 475B7519.7040609@dunslane.net
Whole thread Raw
In response to Bad security practice in oid2name and pgbench  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-hackers

Tom Lane wrote:
> While going through the contrib documentation, I notice that both
> oid2name and pgbench allow specifying a password on the command line,
> ie
>     -P password
>
> This is known to be horribly bad security practice (because the password
> is exposed to everyone else on the machine), and we don't allow any of
> our standard applications to do it.  Why is contrib getting a free pass?
>
> I think we should fix these two programs to work the same as our
> other apps, ie, interactively prompt for password when needed.
>
>   

Maybe we should also refuse to take passwords from conninfo strings 
passed as dbname params, for the same reason. Probably the simplest way 
would be add a flag to the arguments to 
libpq/fe-connect.c::connectOptions1() to indicate whether or not to get 
the password out of the string.

cheers

andrew




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