URL encoding of password wrong/incomplete

[dkrizic]

Hi,

I created a database like this

  users:
    - name: step-ca
      databases:
        - stepca
      options: 'SUPERUSER'

I got this random password here

Lgrd}oKjF287_nUn6,=s<:O|

The URI in the secret looks like this:

postgresql://step-ca:Lgrd%7DoKjF287_nUn6,=s%3C%3AO%7C@master-primary.persistence.svc:5432/stepca

But my client does not like it:

Error opening database of Type postgresql: error parsing PostgreSQL DSN: cannot parse `postgresql://step-ca:Lgrd%7DoKjF287_nUn6`: failed to parse as URL (parse "postgresql://step-ca:Lgrd%7DoKjF287_nUn6": invalid port ":Lgrd%7DoKjF287_nUn6" after host)

I reconstructed the uri by myself by url encoding the password with another implementation and now got this:

postgresql://step-ca:Lgrd%7DoKjF287_nUn6%2C%3Ds%3C%3AO%7C@master-primary.persistence.svc:5432/stepca

Now my client is happy. So the difference is

Lgrd%7DoKjF287_nUn6,=s%3C%3AO%7C
Lgrd%7DoKjF287_nUn6%2C%3Ds%3C%3AO%7C

Obviously the comma (,) and equal sign (=) should be escaped as well.

[cbandy]

We use Go's net/url package to create these, and that's following RFC 3986, which says , and = do not need to be percent-encoded in the user/password portion, but Postgres connection strings deviate from the RFC:

URIs generally follow RFC 3986, except…

The connection URI needs to be encoded with percent-encoding if it includes symbols with special meaning in any of its parts. Here is an example where the equal sign (=) is replaced with %3D and the space character with %20…

We should do more here to work correctly with libpq and other clients.

In the meantime, you can set spec.users.password.type to AlphaNumeric to avoid special characters altogether.

[cbandy]

@dkrizic does your client accept u/p in the query portion of the URI?

postgresql://master-primary.persistence.svc:5432/stepca?user=step-ca&password=Lgrd%7DoKjF287_nUn6%2C%3Ds%3C%3AO%7C

[dkrizic]

@dkrizic does your client accept u/p in the query portion of the URI?

postgresql://master-primary.persistence.svc:5432/stepca?user=step-ca&password=Lgrd%7DoKjF287_nUn6%2C%3Ds%3C%3AO%7C

Yes, this connection string works.

My Postgres client is: https://github.com/smallstep
Which uses the pox driver for Go to access the database: https://github.com/smallstep/nosql/blob/master/postgresql/postgresql.go
The driver itself is here: https://github.com/jackc/pgx

[dkrizic]

BTW: My workaround is to use the urlencode from terraform: postgresql://step-ca:${urlencode(data.kubernetes_secret.step-ca-password.data.password)}@master-primary.persistence.svc:5432/stepca

(I know, my password is compromised, but it is only a PoC I am working on)