• Heikki Linnakangas's avatar
    Don't allow logging in with empty password. · bf6b9e94
    Heikki Linnakangas authored
    Some authentication methods allowed it, others did not. In the client-side,
    libpq does not even try to authenticate with an empty password, which makes
    using empty passwords hazardous: an administrator might think that an
    account with an empty password cannot be used to log in, because psql
    doesn't allow it, and not realize that a different client would in fact
    allow it. To clear that confusion and to be be consistent, disallow empty
    passwords in all authentication methods.
    
    All the authentication methods that used plaintext authentication over the
    wire, except for BSD authentication, already checked that the password
    received from the user was not empty. To avoid forgetting it in the future
    again, move the check to the recv_password_packet function. That only
    forbids using an empty password with plaintext authentication, however.
    MD5 and SCRAM need a different fix:
    
    * In stable branches, check that the MD5 hash stored for the user does not
    not correspond to an empty string. This adds some overhead to MD5
    authentication, because the server needs to compute an extra MD5 hash, but
    it is not noticeable in practice.
    
    * In HEAD, modify CREATE and ALTER ROLE to clear the password if an empty
    string, or a password hash that corresponds to an empty string, is
    specified. The user-visible behavior is the same as in the stable branches,
    the user cannot log in, but it seems better to stop the empty password from
    entering the system in the first place. Secondly, it is fairly expensive to
    check that a SCRAM hash doesn't correspond to an empty string, because
    computing a SCRAM hash is much more expensive than an MD5 hash by design,
    so better avoid doing that on every authentication.
    
    We could clear the password on CREATE/ALTER ROLE also in stable branches,
    but we would still need to check at authentication time, because even if we
    prevent empty passwords from being stored in pg_authid, there might be
    existing ones there already.
    
    Reported by Jeroen van der Ham, Ben de Graaff and Jelte Fennema.
    
    Security: CVE-2017-7546
    bf6b9e94
password.out 4.5 KB