SSPI is a Windows technology for secure authentication with single sign-on. PostgreSQL will use SSPI in negotiate mode, which will use Kerberos when possible and automatically fall back to NTLM in other cases. SSPI and GSSAPI interoperate as clients and servers, e.g., an SSPI client can authenticate to an GSSAPI server. It is recommended to use SSPI on Windows clients and servers and GSSAPI on non-Windows platforms.
When using Kerberos authentication, SSPI works the same way GSSAPI does; see Section 20.6 for details.
The following configuration options are supported for SSPI:
include_realmIf set to 0, the realm name from the authenticated user principal is stripped off before being passed through the user name mapping (Section 20.2). This is discouraged and is primarily available for backwards compatibility, as it is not secure in multi-realm environments unless krb_realm is also used. It is recommended to leave include_realm set to the default (1) and to provide an explicit mapping in pg_ident.conf to convert principal names to PostgreSQL user names.
compat_realmIf set to 1, the domain's SAM-compatible name (also known as the NetBIOS name) is used for the include_realm option. This is the default. If set to 0, the true realm name from the Kerberos user principal name is used.
Do not disable this option unless your server runs under a domain account (this includes virtual service accounts on a domain member system) and all clients authenticating through SSPI are also using domain accounts, or authentication will fail.
upn_usernameIf this option is enabled along with compat_realm, the user name from the Kerberos UPN is used for authentication. If it is disabled (the default), the SAM-compatible user name is used. By default, these two names are identical for new user accounts.
Note that libpq uses the SAM-compatible name if no explicit user name is specified. If you use libpq or a driver based on it, you should leave this option disabled or explicitly specify user name in the connection string.
mapAllows for mapping between system and database user names. See Section 20.2 for details. For an SSPI/Kerberos principal, such as [email protected] (or, less commonly, username/[email protected]), the user name used for mapping is [email protected] (or username/[email protected], respectively), unless include_realm has been set to 0, in which case username (or username/hostbased) is what is seen as the system user name when mapping.
krb_realmSets the realm to match user principal names against. If this parameter is set, only users of that realm will be accepted. If it is not set, users of any realm can connect, subject to whatever user name mapping is done.
If you see anything in the documentation that is not correct, does not match your experience with the particular feature or requires further clarification, please use this form to report a documentation issue.