[Engine-devel] Dropping encryption of database password

[Eli Mesika]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Alon Bar-Lev" <alonbl at redhat.com>
> To: "engine-devel" <engine-devel at ovirt.org>
> Cc: "Yair Zaslavsky" <yzaslavs at redhat.com>, "Eli Mesika" <emesika at redhat.com>, "Juan Hernandez" <jhernand at redhat.com>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2013 10:41:20 PM
> Subject: Dropping encryption of database password
> 
> Hello,
> 
> Currently we store database password encrypted using
> org.picketbox.datasource.security.SecureIdentityLoginModule.
> 
> This is reverse encryption with common knowledge shared secret.
> 
> Using encryption with common knowledge shared secret is close to void
> protection.
> 
> So far we also stored the password as plain text at
> /etc/ovirt-engine/.pgpass, this is going to be removed as no component
> actually uses the .pgpass, however we do need to store non-java specific
> password in for utilities.
> 
> In master (aiming to 3.3), we store the database connection details in own
> file /etc/ovirt-engine/engine.conf.d/50-setup-database.conf owned by ovirt
> user and not world readable.
> 
> I would like to use the same 50-setup-database.conf to store plain text
> password and remove the java specific reversible encrypted password usage.
> 
> Bottom line...
> 1. We drop the .pgpass file.
> 2. We store database connection information in
> /etc/ovirt-engine/engine.conf.d/<file> that is readable only by ovirt usage.
> 3. We drop the java specific reversible encryption in favor of plain text.
> 
> Thoughts?

I see no problem in the .pgpass , only root can access it (it has 0600 mode , if it doesn't it is ignored by PG)
Apart from that , this is the standard way used by PG so why not using it , AFAIK this is considered safe & secured 


> Alon
>