maria-developers team mailing list archive

[Sergei Golubchik <serg@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, Vicențiu!

On Oct 21, Vicențiu Ciorbaru wrote:
> Hi Sergei!
> 
> Here are my review comments, inline. Read them from oldest to newest 
> commit, that's how I wrote them. :)

> > 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.
> 
> 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.

I tried to, but it was too time-consuming so I gave up. All other
changes were related to the MDEV I was doing, but this host cleanup
was not, so I didn't want to spend too much time on it

> > 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.

Right, I use "cleanup:" in the commit subject when it's an internal
change that does not change any user visible behavior. This one doesn't
have the magic word... :)

> > 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)

I saw two possible solutions:

1. load users w/o a plugin anyway, mark ACL_USER in memory as
   "incomplete". Now if such a user is used in authentication (somebody
   tries to log in as it) and a plugin is found this time - complete
   initialization and remove the "incomplete" flag. In fact, such lazy
   initialization can be done for all ACL_USER, plugins or not.

2. on any INSTALL authentication_plugin, perform an automatic FLUSH
   PRIVILEGES.

First one is the most faithful emulation of the old behavior, second is
simpler but might have strange side effects.

And, really, I don't think it's a sufficiently common or important use
case to justify a workaround. Normally plugins aren't loaded/unloaded
all the time, they're installed once and then used. And if a new plugin
is loaded for the first time, there cannot be any accounts that use it.
So, this must be a pretty uncommon case.  One can just do
FLUSH PRIVILEGES, if needed.

In rpm/deb packages, in particular, we tend to use plugin-load-add in
my.cnf files, not run-time INSTALL PLUGIN statement.

> 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?

Hmm, I don't know. I've noticed this issue, but I'm not sure of the
security implications.

For FLUSH PRIVILEGES one needs RELOAD privilege, for seeing all users
one needs SELECT on mysql.user.

I could use a different warning, depending on the privileges, but it'd
be very weird...

> 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.

Sure. In the spirit of what was said above, I've fixed the bug by
throwing an error, similar to what we do with corrupted tables - DROP
works, but nothing else does.

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

because mysql_install_db still uses INSERT, the plugin column is
initially empty, but any GRANT changes it to "mysql_native_password".
This fails post-test checks. Normally it's not an issue, because tests
create new users, not grant anything to root@localhost. But a couple of
tests do, and I added `UPDATE mysql.user SET plugin=''` to one of them
and removed a `GRANT EVENT TO root@localhost` from the other (it was
completely unnecessary, as root has all privileges anyway).

> 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?

1. Yes.
2. plugin is executed in the server address space, if a plugin wants to
   do something bad, we cannot stop it
3. not MAX_SCRAMBLE_LENGTH, hash_password() gets the buffer length in
   the last argument, it doesn't need to rely on any defines that aren't
   part of the API.

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

dunno, they're tested with mysql_native_password, mysql_old_password,
and ed25519.

> 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)

Yes, preprocess_hash errors are tested (because it fails if the hash is
of incorrect length and this happens in tests).
I don't see how hash_password can fail. The error is still returned,
if it would, but it'd be up to a plugin to produce a meaningful error
message.

Regards,
Sergei
Chief Architect MariaDB
and security@xxxxxxxxxxx