Re: [pgAdmin4][Patch] - RM 5457 - Kerberos Authentication - Phase 1

Greetings,

* Dave Page (dpage@pgadmin.org) wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2021 at 1:15 PM Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:
> > One question around that though -- when I click "save password" on a
> > database connection in pgadmin, it gets stored on the pgadmin server.
> > Isn't the key used to encrypt that derived from my password?  If I'm
> > logging into pgadmin without a password (using kerberos),what would
> > that key be derived from?
>
> Also correct - and right now, the plan is to disable password saving if
> logged in using Kerberos.

Disable password *saving*, or disable password *using*?

If you're saying that, when Kerberos is enabled, users will never be
prompted to provide a password because password-based auth has been
disabled, then perhaps that's reasonable.  I don't know how useful such
a pgadmin setup would be, but at least it wouldn't be violating one of
the core values that using Kerberos brings.

If you're saying that this is just disabling password *saving*, then
that implies that if someone actually wants to use pgadmin to, uh, log
into a PostgreSQL server which is configured for md5 or SCRAM auth or
LDAP based auth that the way that'll work is that pgadmin will prompt
the user for a password, which the user will provide and which will
then be sent from the client to the pgadmin system in the clear, and
which pgadmin will turn around and use to log into PG with, right?

It's the latter than I'm concerned with because it just wouldn't be
appropriate for a Kerberized service which is set up to use Kerberos to
then prompt the user for a password.