maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Vicențiu Ciorbaru <vicentiu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Sergei!

Here are my review comments, inline. Read them from oldest to newest 
commit, that's how I wrote them. :)

On 17/10/2018 23:40, Sergei Golubchik wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Please review commits for
>
>    MDEV-12321 "authentication plugin: SET PASSWORD support"
>
> They're now in the bb-10.4-serg branch, the last seven commits:
>
> =========================
> commit 62e8340f513
> Author: Sergei Golubchik <serg@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date:   Wed Oct 17 12:48:13 2018 +0200
>
>      MDEV-12321 authentication plugin: SET PASSWORD support
>      
>      Support SET PASSWORD for authentication plugins.
>      
>      Authentication plugin API is extended with two optional methods:
>      * hash_password() is used to compute a password hash (or digest)
>        from the plain-text password. This digest will be stored in mysql.user
>        table
>      * preprocess_hash() is used to convert this digest into some memory
>        representation that can be later used to authenticate a user.
>        Build-in plugins convert the hash from hexadecimal or base64 to binary,
>        to avoid doing it on every authentication attempt.
>      
>      Note a change in behavior: when loading privileges (on startup or on
>      FLUSH PRIVILEGES) an account with an unknown plugin was loaded with a
>      warning (e.g. "Plugin 'foo' is not loaded"). But such an account could
>      not be used for authentication until the plugin is installed. Now an
>      account like that will not be loaded at all (with a warning, still).
>      Indeed, without plugin's preprocess_hash() method the server cannot know
>      how to load an account. Thus, if a new authentication plugin is
>      installed run-time, one might need FLUSH PRIVILEGES to activate all
>      existing accounts that were using this new plugin.
First a note about the behavior change:

This potentially causes a difficulty in debugging failed user 
authentication. Before, if say unix socket auth plugin was not installed 
when trying to connect, you'd get ER_PLUGIN_IS_NOT_LOADED, now you get 
ER_ACCESS_DENIED_ERROR. This provided a hint as to what went wrong. Is 
there a way for an admin to track down the issue now, without resorting 
to blind "FLUSH PRIVILEGES;"? (I've never been in that position so I 
don't know if this is really an issue or not)

Also, warnings now on flush privileges are hard to associate with a 
particular user, if one has a lot of them. Maybe we add a "for user xxx" 
to the warnings?

Can one update privileges on a user which was not loaded? I saw that 
dropping works, but granting something leads to a weird side-effect of 
updating the plugin & authentication_string fields for the user:

#### Before grant. (from grant5.test)

select user, host, plugin, authentication_string from mysql.user where 
user = 'u1';
user    host    plugin    authentication_string
u1    h    mysql_native_password    bad

#### After grant

grant SELECT on *.* to u1@h;
select user, host, plugin, authentication_string from mysql.user where 
user = 'u1';
user    host    plugin    authentication_string
u1    h    mysql_native_password

If before grant, the user would have had something other than 
mysql_native_password, that one would have been changed too. It's a 
weird corner case, but do you think this is the correct way to handle 
it? I'd rather not mess with changing the plugin and 
authentication_string in this case. (I did see the code about the 
historical-hack and guess_auth_plugin)

I also did check this in 10.2 (just because it was already compiled, but 
nothing significant changed in 10.3), that grant in this case would not 
drop the user's password.


Here's an example:
CREATE USER foo@localhost identified by 'pwd';

select user, host, password, plugin, authentication_string from 
mysql.user where user='foo';
#This grant won't drop the password.
grant select on *.* to foo@localhost;
select user, host, password, plugin, authentication_string from 
mysql.user where user='foo';

update mysql.user set authentication_string = 'bad' where user='foo';
flush privileges;

select user, host, password, plugin, authentication_string from 
mysql.user where user='foo';
# This grant will drop the password.
grant select on *.* to foo@localhost;
select user, host, password, plugin, authentication_string from 
mysql.user where user='foo';

connect con1, localhost, foo,,;
# foo can select everything, with no password
select user, host from mysql.user;

I suggest we don't overwrite authentication string in this case within 
the grant statement in this case.


Why the change in mysql-test/suite/rpl/include/rpl_mixed_dml.inc? It 
feels a bit related to the paragraph above.


Now about the code itself:

hash_password function call could lead to buffer overflow, then all 
sorts of potential security hacks if the plugin doesn't play nice and 
writes more than MAX_SCRAMBLE_LENGTH to the buffer. Not sure if there's 
a way to guard against this or if we want to in the first place. It is 
the admin's job to load sane password plugins right?

I know this would imply a bit more work, but shouldn't we test the extra 
API methods with a mock-up plugin too?

Would preprocess_hash call failure actually exit in sane way in the 
caller function? Currently we don't report any specific error or warning 
message. (same for hash_password)

That's all I could find. There are a few bits of code style changes, but 
I'm going to merge a big one with reverse privileges. Will end up fixing 
them there anyway.

Vicențiu

> commit 8266ca26f27
> Author: Sergei Golubchik <serg@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date:   Mon Oct 15 01:39:03 2018 +0200
>
>      misc cleanups
>      
>      * remove dead code (from .yy)
>      * remove redundant commands from the test
>      * extract common code into a reusable function
>        (get_auth_plugin, push_new_user)
>      * rename update_user_table->update_user_table_password
>      * simplify acl_update_role
>      * don't strdup a string that's already in a memroot
>        (in ACL_ROLE::ACL_ROLE(ACL_USER*))
>      * create parent_grantee and role_grants dynamic arrays with size 0.
>        to avoid any memory allocations when roles aren't used.

Looks good, except that you don't seem to be simplifying 
acl_update_role, but acl_update user.

update_user_table_password needs more indentation now for the 2 extra 
lines of arguments on the function's definition.

> commit fd0bcb5e791
> Author: Sergei Golubchik <serg@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date:   Sun Oct 14 13:52:52 2018 +0200
>
>      Use mysql.user.authentication_string for password
>      
>      Don't distinguish between a "password hash" and "authentication string"
>      anymore. Now both are stored in mysql.user.authentication_string, both
>      are handled identically internally. A "password hash" is just how some
>      particular plugins interpret authentication string.
>      
>      Set mysql.user.plugin even if there is no password. The server will use
>      mysql_native_password plugin in these cases, let's make it expicit.
>      
>      Remove LEX_USER::pwhash.
Looks good. Lots of test updates. First patch that seemed to have 
potential to introduce bugs. I looked to see if anything was missing, 
but couldn't find anything.
> commit 15f30100e0d
> Author: Sergei Golubchik <serg@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date:   Sat Oct 13 18:32:05 2018 +0200
>
>      cleanup: sql_acl.cc remove fix_plugin_ptr()
>      
>      it was doing two my_strcasecmp() unconditionally, to optimize away one
>      conditional my_strcasecmp() later.
Looks good. Interesting find. I knew the reason for fix_plugin_ptr, but 
I assumed it's used more often than it actually is.
> commit df9d95d2a85
> Author: Sergei Golubchik <serg@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date:   Sat Oct 13 11:30:39 2018 +0200
>
>      cleanup: sql_acl.cc remove username=NULL
>      
>      Some parts of sql_acl.cc historically assumed that empty username
>      is represented by username=NULL, other parts used username="" for that.
>      And most of the code wasn't sure and checked both
>      (like in `if (!user || !user[0])`).
>      
>      Change it to use an empty string everywhere.

Looks good.

In the future we should do this for other bits too (such as host, 
plugin, etc.) I'd rather look at getting rid of get_field calls and 
converting the resulting string to int or float (such as how we do for 
user_resource part of ACL_USER). We're doing a bit of that with reverse 
privileges, so no need to do it in this change set.

> commit 8b3cbc1e469
> Author: Sergei Golubchik <serg@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date:   Fri Oct 12 18:48:15 2018 +0200
>
>      cleanup: sql_acl.cc password->LEX_CSTRING
Looks good.
> commit 2fc7a20da6a
> Author: Sergei Golubchik <serg@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date:   Fri Oct 12 19:24:28 2018 +0200
>
>      cleanup: safe_lexcstrdup_root()

Looks good.


> =========================
>
> I've split somewhat independent changes into separate commits, but, of
> course, if you'd like to review one big patch you can `git diff` them
> all together.
>
> Now, the syntax problem.
>
> Old MySQL syntax (for the last ~20 years) was
>
> (1)  GRANT ... TO user IDENTIFIED BY 'plain-text password'
> (2)  GRANT ... TO user IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD 'password hash'
> (3)  SET PASSWORD = 'password hash'
> (4)  SET PASSWORD = PASSWORD('plain-text password')
> (5)  SET PASSWORD = OLD_PASSWORD('plain-text password')
>
> here, syntax (1) and (4) were forcing mysql_native_password
> authentication, (5) was forcing mysql_old_password, and (2) and (3) were
> auto-detecting, based on the hash length.
>
> Later MariaDB and MySQL added support for pluggable authentication with
> the syntax
>
> (6)  GRANT ... TO user IDENTIFIED VIA plugin AS 'password hash'
>
> MySQL 5.7 added support for specifying plain-text password for plugins
> using the syntax
>
> (7) GRANT ... TO user IDENTIFIED WITH plugin BY 'plain-text password'
>
> I don't quite like it because there's no logical reason why "BY" means a
> plain-text password, while "AS" means a hash. Also we support "USING"
> instead of "AS", which also means a hash. One can easily get lost in all
> these USING/AS/BY and what special semantics each of them has.
>
> The syntax I've implemented is based on SET PASSWORD:
>
> (8) GRANT ... TO user IDENTIFIED VIA plugin AS PASSWORD('plain-text password')
>
> This is quite intuitive and pretends that there's a sql function
> PASSWORD() which returns a hash and it's used as an expression where a
> hash is anyway expected. Same works in SET PASSWORD too, obviously.
> A PASSWORD() function actually exists and returns the password hash.
>
> The problem here is that PASSWORD() function becomes quite magical. It
> returns a different password, depending on what plugin the user is
> using. One can still do SELECT PASSWORD("foo"), OLD_PASSWORD("foo"),
> but they'll return values for mysql_native_password and
> mysql_old_password as before. In the context of SET PASSWORD or GRANT
> (or CREATE/ALTER USER) it becomes context dependent, it's a bit
> difficult to swallow.
>
> Another approach would be not to pretend it's a function. Say
>
> (9) GRANT ... TO user IDENTIFIED VIA plugin AS PASSWORD 'plain-text password'
>      SET PASSWORD = PASSWORD 'plain-text password'
>
> but, unfortunately, it is exactly backwards from the historical behaviour
> of (1) and (2).
>
> All in all I'm leaning towards (8), but I'm not quite happy with it :(
> One way to solve it could be to extend PASSWORD() function to allow a
> second argument, plugin name, like in
>
>    SELECT PASSWORD("foo", "ed25519")
>
> Yet another way could be to remove SQL-level functions PASSWORD() and
> OLD_PASSWORD(). That would be my favorite, they always were nothing but
> trouble. But I wouldn't risk doing it now :)
>
> Regards,
> Sergei