[Twisted-Python] Plain text password with PB authentication?

[Boersma, Matt]

First, thanks to Itamar for nudging me in the right direction.  I never thought of looking at the unit tests for documentation, but so far that's the clearest explanation of the new PBServerFactory stuff I've seen.

Here's my problem.  I have a PB client that calls login against the server, with a UsernamePassword object as credentials.  PB sets up for me nice default implementations of the authentication mechanisms, but refuses to send the actual password to the server, only a doubly MD5-hashed version of same.

No!  Stop your flames!  Trading only hashes across the wire makes perfect sense--in most cases.  I fully understand, and I've written nearly identical Java code recently to do the same.

But...in this case I want simply to delegate the actual authentication on the server side to an Oracle login.  That is, if I can get a SQLConnectionPool with the given username and password and execute a test query, then the user is considered authenticated.  This requires that the server have the actual password, not its hash.  (Oracle doesn't appear to support anything besides clear text login, at least through the cx_Oracle and DCOracle2 APIs.)

So my options are:
- Create subclasses of PBClientFactory, CredentialsChecker, perhaps others, purely to undo the strict md5-hashing behavior of PB instead supply the clear text password.
- Leave the existing authentication as-is and create a dummy CredentialsChecker that always allows login.  Then do the "real" authentication in a secondary method the client is required to call.

Which of these two ugly approaches is more Twisted?

This electronic message transmission is a PRIVATE communication which contains
information which may be confidential or privileged. The information is intended 
to be for the use of the individual or entity named above. If you are not the 
intended recipient, please be aware that any disclosure, copying, distribution 
or use of the contents of this information is prohibited. Please notify the
sender  of the delivery error by replying to this message, or notify us by
telephone (877-633-2436, ext. 0), and then delete it from your system.