The following subsections describe the authentication methods in more detail.
When trust authentication is specified, PostgreSQL assumes that anyone who can connect to the server is authorized to access the database with whatever database user name they specify (including superusers). Of course, restrictions made in the database and user columns still apply. This method should only be used when there is adequate operating-system-level protection on connections to the server.
trust authentication is appropriate and very convenient for local connections on a single-user workstation. It is usually not appropriate by itself on a multiuser machine. However, you might be able to use trust even on a multiuser machine, if you restrict access to the server's Unix-domain socket file using file-system permissions. To do this, set the unix_socket_permissions (and possibly unix_socket_group) configuration parameters as described in Section 18.3. Or you could set the unix_socket_directory configuration parameter to place the socket file in a suitably restricted directory.
Setting file-system permissions only helps for Unix-socket connections. Local TCP/IP connections are not restricted by it; therefore, if you want to use file-system permissions for local security, remove the host ... 127.0.0.1 ... line from pg_hba.conf, or change it to a non-trust authentication method.
trust authentication is only suitable for TCP/IP connections if you trust every user on every machine that is allowed to connect to the server by the pg_hba.conf lines that specify trust. It is seldom reasonable to use trust for any TCP/IP connections other than those from localhost (127.0.0.1).
The password-based authentication methods are md5, crypt, and password. These methods operate similarly except for the way that the password is sent across the connection: respectively, MD5-hashed, crypt-encrypted, and clear-text. A limitation is that the crypt method does not work with passwords that have been encrypted in pg_authid.
If you are at all concerned about password "sniffing" attacks then md5 is preferred, with crypt to be used only if you must support pre-7.2 clients. Plain password should be avoided especially for connections over the open Internet (unless you use SSL, SSH, or another communications security wrapper around the connection).
PostgreSQL database passwords are separate from operating system user passwords. The password for each database user is stored in the pg_authid system catalog. Passwords can be managed with the SQL commands CREATE USER and ALTER USER, e.g., CREATE USER foo WITH PASSWORD 'secret';. By default, that is, if no password has been set up, the stored password is null and password authentication will always fail for that user.
GSSAPI is an industry-standard protocol for secure authentication defined in RFC 2743. PostgreSQL supports GSSAPI with Kerberos authentication according to RFC 1964. GSSAPI provides automatic authentication (single sign-on) for systems that support it. The authentication itself is secure, but the data sent over the connection will be in clear unless SSL is used.
When GSSAPI uses Kerberos, it uses a standard principal in format servicename/hostname@realm. For information about the parts of the principal, and how to set up the required keys, see Section 21.2.5. GSSAPI support has to be enabled when PostgreSQL is built; see Chapter 15 for more information.
SSPI is a Windows technology for secure authentication with single sign-on. PostgreSQL will use SSPI in negotiate mode, which will use Kerberos when possible and automatically fall back to NTLM in other cases. SSPI authentication only works when both server and client are running Windows.
When using Kerberos authentication, SSPI works the same way GSSAPI does. See Section 21.2.3 for details.
Note: Native Kerberos authentication has been deprecated and should be used only for backward compatibility. New and upgraded installations are encouraged to use the industry-standard GSSAPI authentication (see Section 21.2.3) instead.
Kerberos is an industry-standard secure authentication system suitable for distributed computing over a public network. A description of the Kerberos system is far beyond the scope of this document; in full generality it can be quite complex (yet powerful). The Kerberos FAQ or MIT Kerberos page can be good starting points for exploration. Several sources for Kerberos distributions exist. Kerberos provides secure authentication but does not encrypt queries or data passed over the network; for that use SSL.
PostgreSQL supports Kerberos version 5. Kerberos support has to be enabled when PostgreSQL is built; see Chapter 15 for more information.
PostgreSQL operates like a normal Kerberos service. The name of the service principal is servicename/hostname@realm.
servicename can be set on the server side using the krb_srvname configuration parameter, and on the client side using the krbsrvname connection parameter. (See also Section 30.1.) The installation default can be changed from the default postgres at build time using ./configure --with-krb-srvnam=whatever. In most environments, this parameter never needs to be changed. However, to support multiple PostgreSQL installations on the same host it is necessary. Some Kerberos implementations might also require a different service name, such as Microsoft Active Directory which requires the service name to be in uppercase (POSTGRES).
hostname is the fully qualified host name of the server machine. The service principal's realm is the preferred realm of the server machine.
Client principals must have their PostgreSQL database user name as their first component, for example pgusername@realm. By default, the realm of the client is not checked by PostgreSQL. If you have cross-realm authentication enabled and need to verify the realm, use the krb_realm parameter.
Make sure that your server keytab file is readable (and preferably only readable) by the PostgreSQL server account. (See also Section 17.1.) The location of the key file is specified by the krb_server_keyfile configuration parameter. The default is /usr/local/pgsql/etc/krb5.keytab (or whichever directory was specified as sysconfdir at build time).
The keytab file is generated by the Kerberos software; see the Kerberos documentation for details. The following example is for MIT-compatible Kerberos 5 implementations:
kadmin% ank -randkey postgres/server.my.domain.org kadmin% ktadd -k krb5.keytab postgres/server.my.domain.org
When connecting to the database make sure you have a ticket for a principal matching the requested database user name. For example, for database user name fred, both principal [email protected] and fred/[email protected] could be used to authenticate to the database server.
If you use mod_auth_kerb and mod_perl on your Apache web server, you can use AuthType KerberosV5SaveCredentials with a mod_perl script. This gives secure database access over the web, no extra passwords required.
The ident authentication method works by obtaining the client's operating system user name, then determining the allowed database user names using a map file that lists the permitted corresponding pairs of names. The determination of the client's user name is the security-critical point, and it works differently depending on the connection type.
The "Identification Protocol" is described in RFC 1413. Virtually every Unix-like operating system ships with an ident server that listens on TCP port 113 by default. The basic functionality of an ident server is to answer questions like "What user initiated the connection that goes out of your port X and connects to my port Y?". Since PostgreSQL knows both X and Y when a physical connection is established, it can interrogate the ident server on the host of the connecting client and could theoretically determine the operating system user for any given connection this way.
The drawback of this procedure is that it depends on the integrity of the client: if the client machine is untrusted or compromised an attacker could run just about any program on port 113 and return any user name he chooses. This authentication method is therefore only appropriate for closed networks where each client machine is under tight control and where the database and system administrators operate in close contact. In other words, you must trust the machine running the ident server. Heed the warning:
The Identification Protocol is not intended as an authorization or access control protocol. | ||
| --RFC 1413 | ||
Some ident servers have a nonstandard option that causes the returned user name to be encrypted, using a key that only the originating machine's administrator knows. This option must not be used when using the ident server with PostgreSQL, since PostgreSQL does not have any way to decrypt the returned string to determine the actual user name.
On systems supporting SO_PEERCRED requests for Unix-domain sockets (currently Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and BSD/OS), ident authentication can also be applied to local connections. In this case, no security risk is added by using ident authentication; indeed it is a preferable choice for local connections on such systems.
On systems without SO_PEERCRED requests, ident authentication is only available for TCP/IP connections. As a work-around, it is possible to specify the localhost address 127.0.0.1 and make connections to this address. This method is trustworthy to the extent that you trust the local ident server.
When using ident-based authentication, after having determined the name of the operating system user that initiated the connection, PostgreSQL checks whether that user is allowed to connect as the database user he is requesting to connect as. This is controlled by the ident map argument that follows the ident key word in the pg_hba.conf file. There is a predefined ident map sameuser, which allows any operating system user to connect as the database user of the same name (if the latter exists). Other maps must be created manually.
Ident maps other than sameuser are defined in the ident map file, which by default is named pg_ident.conf and is stored in the cluster's data directory. (It is possible to place the map file elsewhere, however; see the ident_file configuration parameter.) The ident map file contains lines of the general form:
map-name ident-username database-username
Comments and whitespace are handled in the same way as in pg_hba.conf. The map-name is an arbitrary name that will be used to refer to this mapping in pg_hba.conf. The other two fields specify which operating system user is allowed to connect as which database user. The same map-name can be used repeatedly to specify more user-mappings within a single map. There is no restriction regarding how many database users a given operating system user can correspond to, nor vice versa.
The pg_ident.conf file is read on start-up and when the main server process receives a SIGHUP signal. If you edit the file on an active system, you will need to signal the server (using pg_ctl reload or kill -HUP) to make it re-read the file.
A pg_ident.conf file that could be used in conjunction with the pg_hba.conf file in Example 21-1 is shown in Example 21-2. In this example setup, anyone logged in to a machine on the 192.168 network that does not have the Unix user name bryanh, ann, or robert would not be granted access. Unix user robert would only be allowed access when he tries to connect as PostgreSQL user bob, not as robert or anyone else. ann would only be allowed to connect as ann. User bryanh would be allowed to connect as either bryanh himself or as guest1.
This authentication method operates similarly to password except that it uses LDAP as the authentication method. LDAP is used only to validate the user name/password pairs. Therefore the user must already exist in the database before LDAP can be used for authentication. The server and parameters used are specified after the ldap key word in the file pg_hba.conf. The format of this parameter is:
ldap[s]://servername[:port]/base dn[;prefix[;suffix]]
Commas are used to specify multiple items in an ldap component. However, because unquoted commas are treated as item separators in pg_hba.conf, it is wise to double-quote the ldap URL to preserve any commas present, e.g.:
"ldap://ldap.example.net/dc=example,dc=net;EXAMPLE\"
If ldaps is specified instead of ldap, TLS encryption will be enabled for the connection. Note that this will encrypt only the connection between the PostgreSQL server and the LDAP server. The connection between the client and the PostgreSQL server is not affected by this setting. To make use of TLS encryption, you might need to configure the LDAP library prior to configuring PostgreSQL. Note that encrypted LDAP is available only if the platform's LDAP library supports it.
If no port is specified, the default port as configured in the LDAP library will be used.
The server will bind to the distinguished name specified as base dn using the user name supplied by the client. If prefix and suffix is specified, it will be prepended and appended to the user name before the bind. Typically, the prefix parameter is used to specify cn=, or DOMAIN\ in an Active Directory environment.
This authentication method operates similarly to password except that it uses PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) as the authentication mechanism. The default PAM service name is postgresql. You can optionally supply your own service name after the pam key word in the file pg_hba.conf. PAM is used only to validate user name/password pairs. Therefore the user must already exist in the database before PAM can be used for authentication. For more information about PAM, please read the Linux-PAM Page and the Solaris PAM Page.
Note: If PAM is set up to read /etc/shadow, authentication will fail because the PostgreSQL server is started by a non-root user. However, this is not an issue with LDAP or other authentication methods.