Re: Increase psql's password buffer size

Hi,

I think I should add my two cents.

On Mon, 20 Jan 2020 at 20:38, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
> > I found another place that assumes 100 bytes and upped it to 2048.

There one more place, in the code which is parsing .pgpass

>
> So this is pretty much exactly what I expected.  And have you tried
> it with e.g. PAM, or LDAP?
>
> I think the AWS guys are fools to imagine that this will work in very
> many places, and I don't see why we should be leading the charge to
> make it work for them.  What's the point of having a huge amount of
> data in a password, anyway?

We at Zalando are using JWT tokens as passwords. JWT tokens are
self-contained and therefore quite huge (up to 700-800 bytes in our
case). Tokens have a limited lifetime (1 hour) and we are using PAM to
verify them.
Altogether the whole thing works like a charm. The only problem that
it is not possible to copy&paste the token into psql password prompt,
but there is a workaround, export PGPASSWORD=verylongtokenstring &&
psql

JWT: https://jwt.io/
PAM module to verify OAuth tokens: https://github.com/CyberDem0n/pam-oauth2

Regards,
--
Alexander Kukushkin