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This adds a new routine, pg_strong_random() for generating random bytes, for use in both frontend and backend. At the moment, it's only used in the backend, but the upcoming SCRAM authentication patches need strong random numbers in libpq as well. pg_strong_random() is based on, and replaces, the existing implementation in pgcrypto. It can acquire strong random numbers from a number of sources, depending on what's available: - OpenSSL RAND_bytes(), if built with OpenSSL - On Windows, the native cryptographic functions are used - /dev/urandom Unlike the current pgcrypto function, the source is chosen by configure. That makes it easier to test different implementations, and ensures that we don't accidentally fall back to a less secure implementation, if the primary source fails. All of those methods are quite reliable, it would be pretty surprising for them to fail, so we'd rather find out by failing hard. If no strong random source is available, we fall back to using erand48(), seeded from current timestamp, like PostmasterRandom() was. That isn't cryptographically secure, but allows us to still work on platforms that don't have any of the above stronger sources. Because it's not very secure, the built-in implementation is only used if explicitly requested with --disable-strong-random. This replaces the more complicated Fortuna algorithm we used to have in pgcrypto, which is unfortunate, but all modern platforms have /dev/urandom, so it doesn't seem worth the maintenance effort to keep that. pgcrypto functions that require strong random numbers will be disabled with --disable-strong-random. Original patch by Magnus Hagander, tons of further work by Michael Paquier and me. Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqRy3krN8quR9XujMVVHYtXJ0_60nqgVc6oUk8ygyVkZsA@mail.gmail.com Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqRWkNYRRPJA7-cF+LfroYV10pvjdz6GNvxk-Eee9FypKA@mail.gmail.com
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.