PostgreSQL 10.0 has a fancy new authentication mechanism; Salted Challenge Response Authentication Method or SCRAM for short.
SCRAM will be an alternative to the somewhat controversial MD5 passwords currently being used by PostgreSQL, Michael Paquier has more to say on that here
This post isn't so much about SCRAM but the implementation of it in the JDBC driver. Last year in Ottawa at pgcon Alvaro from 8kdata stepped up and volunteered to write the Java implementation for the driver.
We've decided to enable this in Java 8+ versions of the driver only for a number of reasons the most important being that the cryptographic libraries required to implement this are only available in the JDK from version 8 and up.
Also factoring into the decision is the fact that SCRAM is only available in PostgreSQL 10.0+ and we are of the opinion that there will be very few people that will upgrade or use PostgreSQL 10.x without upgrading their JDK as well.
SCRAM will be an alternative to the somewhat controversial MD5 passwords currently being used by PostgreSQL, Michael Paquier has more to say on that here
This post isn't so much about SCRAM but the implementation of it in the JDBC driver. Last year in Ottawa at pgcon Alvaro from 8kdata stepped up and volunteered to write the Java implementation for the driver.
We've decided to enable this in Java 8+ versions of the driver only for a number of reasons the most important being that the cryptographic libraries required to implement this are only available in the JDK from version 8 and up.
Also factoring into the decision is the fact that SCRAM is only available in PostgreSQL 10.0+ and we are of the opinion that there will be very few people that will upgrade or use PostgreSQL 10.x without upgrading their JDK as well.
