Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2025 14:25:20 -0400
From: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
To: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Cc: Wolfgang Walther <walther@technowledgy.de>,
	Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com>,
	Daniel Gustafsson <daniel@yesql.se>,
	Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org>,
	Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>,
	Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>,
	PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>,
	Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>,
	Nazir Bilal Yavuz <byavuz81@gmail.com>,
	Antonin Houska <ah@cybertec.at>
Subject: Re: [PoC] Federated Authn/z with OAUTHBEARER
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On Tue, Apr  8, 2025 at 02:11:19PM -0400, Andres Freund wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 2025-04-08 13:02:11 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > On Tue, Apr  8, 2025 at 06:57:18PM +0200, Wolfgang Walther wrote:
> > > Jacob Champion:
> > > > On Tue, Apr 8, 2025 at 9:32 AM Wolfgang Walther <walther@technowledgy.de> wrote:
> > > > > And that should also not be a problem for distributions - they could offer a libpq and a libpq_oauth package, where only one of them can be installed at the same time, I guess? *
> > > > My outsider understanding is that maintaining this sort of thing
> > > > becomes a major headache, because of combinatorics. You don't really
> > > > want to ship a libpq and libpq-with-gss and libpq-with-oauth and
> > > > libpq-with-oauth-and-gss and ...
> > > 
> > > That would only be the case, if you were to consider those other
> > > dependencies as "dangerous" as cURL. But we already depend on them. So if
> > > it's really the case that cURL is that much worse, that we consider loading
> > > it as a module... then the combinatorics should not be a problem either.
> > > 
> > > However, if the other deps are considered problematic as well, then the ship
> > > has already sailed, and there is not point for a special case here anymore.
> > 
> > Yes, I think this is what I am asking too.  For me it was curl's
> > security reputation and whether that would taint the security reputation
> > of libpq. For Tom, I think it was the dependency additions.
> 
> I'd say that curl's security reputation is higher than most of our other
> dependencies. We have dependencies for libraries with regular security issues,
> with those issues at times not getting addressed for prolonged amounts of
> time.

I see curl CVEs regularly as part of Debian minor updates, which is why
I had concerns, but if it is similar to OpenSSL, and better than other
libraries that don't even get CVEs, I guess it okay.  However, is this
true for libpq libraries or database server libraries.  Does it matter?

-- 
  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        https://momjian.us
  EDB                                      https://enterprisedb.com

  Do not let urgent matters crowd out time for investment in the future.