Message-ID: <1d3d62a0-2d7f-4592-bf76-ba59a77e61cc@timescale.com>
Date: Fri, 15 Jul 2022 14:51:38 -0700
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Subject: Re: [PATCH] Log details for client certificate failures
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To: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com>,
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From: Jacob Champion <jchampion@timescale.com>
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On 7/15/22 14:19, Andres Freund wrote:
> On 2022-07-15 14:01:53 -0700, Jacob Champion wrote:
>> On 7/15/22 13:35, Andres Freund wrote:
>>> I don't know, but I don't think not caring at all is a good
>>> option. Particularly for unauthenticated data I'd say that escaping everything
>>> but printable ascii chars is a sensible approach.
>>
>> It'll also be painful for anyone whose infrastructure isn't in a Latin
>> character set... Maybe that's worth the tradeoff for a v1.
> 
> I don't think it's a huge issue, or really avoidable, pre-authentication.
> Don't we require all server-side encodings to be supersets of ascii?

Well, I was going to say that for this feature, where the goal is to
debug a failed certificate chain, having to manually unescape the logged
certificate names if your infrastructure already handled UTF-8 natively
would be a real pain.

But your later point about truncation makes that moot; I forgot that my
patch can truncate in the middle of a UTF-8 sequence, so you're probably
dealing with replacement glyphs anyway. I don't really have a leg to
stand on there.

> We already have pg_clean_ascii() and use it for application_name, fwiw.

That seems much worse than escaping for this particular patch; if your
cert's Common Name is in (non-ASCII) UTF-8 then all you'll see is
"CN=?????????" in the log lines that were supposed to be helping you
root-cause. Escaping would be much more helpful in this case.

>> Is there an acceptable approach that could centralize it, so we fix it
>> once and are done? E.g. a log_encoding GUC and either conversion or
>> escaping in send_message_to_server_log()?
> 
> Introducing escaping to ascii for all log messages seems like it'd be
> incredibly invasive, and would remove a lot of worthwhile information. Nor
> does it really address the whole scope - consider e.g. the truncation in this
> patch, that can't be done correctly by the time send_message_to_server_log()
> is reached - just chopping in the middle of a multi-byte string would have
> made the string invalidly encoded. And we can't perform encoding conversion
> from client data until we've gone further into the authentication process, I
> think.
> 
> Always escaping ANSI escape codes (or rather the non-printable ascii range) is
> more convincing. Then we'd just need to make sure that client controlled data
> is properly encoded before handing it over to other parts of the system.
> 
> I can see a point in a log_encoding GUC at some point, but it seems a bit
> separate from the discussion here.

Fair enough.

--Jacob