Re: Automatic upgrade of passwords from md5 to scram-sha256

On 2025-01-13 12:19:06 -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 12, 2025 at 5:59 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>  [snip]
>
>     I think this idea is a nonstarter, TLS or not.  We're generally moving
>     in the direction of never letting the server see cleartext passwords.
>     It's already possible to configure libpq to refuse such requests
>     (see require_auth parameter), although that hasn't been made the
>     default.
>
>
> ALTER ROLE xxx WITH PASSWORD accepts hashed values, so a client with the
> SCRAM-SHA algorithm could:
> 1. remember the password that was just used to log in,
> 2. generate the new hash, 
> 3. send that as an ALTER ROLE statement.

Modifying the client to re-set the password is actually something I
thought about. There are some technical unknowns (e.g. is
PQencryptPasswordConn accessible through ODBC?) and some organisational
difficulties (e.g. can we get the customers to upgrade to the newest
version?), but I guess in our case it would be doable. But in general
changing every to client to upgrade the password doesn't seem feasible.
Unless maybe you are proposing that libpq should do that? That might
work, but it probably also shouldn't do it by default.