On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 10:32 PM, Peter Geoghegan <pg@heroku.com> wrote:
On Tue, Feb 10, 2015 at 4:21 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote: > Although the patch was described as relatively easy to write, it never > went anywhere, because it *replaced* MD5 authentication with bcrypt, > which would be a big problem for existing clients. It seems clear > that we should add something new and not immediately kill off what > we've already got, so that people can transition smoothly. An idea I > just had today is to keep using basically the same system that we are > currently using for MD5, but with a stronger hash algorithm, like > SHA-1 or SHA-2 (which includes SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, and > SHA-512). Those are slower, but my guess is that even SHA-512 is not > enough slower for anybody to care very much, and if they do, well > that's another reason to make use of the new stuff optional.
I believe that a big advantage of bcrypt for authentication is the relatively high memory requirements. This frustrates GPU based attacks.
There's also scrypt, which can be tuned for both memory and compute requirements.
I don't think the "password storing best practices" apply to db connection authentication. So SHA256 (or any other non terribly broken hash) is probably fine for Pg.
