There are numerous methods by which a Perl or Tcl function can subvert
the behavior of another such function executed later; for example, by
redefining standard functions or operators called by the target function.
If the target function is SECURITY DEFINER, or is called by such a
function, this means that any ordinary SQL user with Perl or Tcl language
usage rights can do essentially anything with the privileges of the target
function's owner.
To close this security hole, create a separate Perl or Tcl interpreter for
each SQL userid under which plperl or pltcl functions are executed within
a session. However, all plperlu or pltclu functions run within a session
still share a single interpreter, since they all execute at the trust
level of a database superuser anyway.
Note: this change results in a functionality loss when libperl has been
built without the "multiplicity" option: it's no longer possible to call
plperl functions under different userids in one session, since such a
libperl can't support multiple interpreters in one process. However, such
a libperl already failed to support concurrent use of plperl and plperlu,
so it's likely that few people use such versions with Postgres.
Security: CVE-2010-3433
formats for geometric types. Per bug #5536 from Jon Strait, and my own
testing.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since this doco has been wrong right
along -- we certainly haven't changed the I/O behavior of these types in
many years.
that is a regular table or view owned by a superuser. This prevents a
trojan horse attack whereby any unprivileged SQL user could create such a
table and insert code into it that would then get executed in other users'
sessions whenever they call pltcl functions.
Worse yet, because the code was automatically loaded into both the "normal"
and "safe" interpreters at first use, the attacker could execute unrestricted
Tcl code in the "normal" interpreter without there being any pltclu functions
anywhere, or indeed anyone else using pltcl at all: installing pltcl is
sufficient to open the hole. Change the initialization logic so that the
"unknown" code is only loaded into an interpreter when the interpreter is
first really used. (That doesn't add any additional security in this
particular context, but it seems a prudent change, and anyway the former
behavior violated the principle of least astonishment.)
Security: CVE-2010-1170
fundamentally insecure. Instead apply an opmask to the whole interpreter that
imposes restrictions on unsafe operations. These restrictions are much harder
to subvert than is Safe.pm, since there is no container to be broken out of.
Backported to release 7.4.
In releases 7.4, 8.0 and 8.1 this also includes the necessary backporting of
the two interpreters model for plperl and plperlu adopted in release 8.2.
In versions 8.0 and up, the use of Perl's POSIX module to undo its locale
mangling on Windows has become insecure with these changes, so it is
replaced by our own routine, which is also faster.
Nice side effects of the changes include that it is now possible to use perl's
"strict" pragma in a natural way in plperl, and that perl's $a and
$b variables now work as expected in sort routines, and that function
compilation is significantly faster.
Tim Bunce and Andrew Dunstan, with reviews from Alex Hunsaker and
Alexey Klyukin.
Security: CVE-2010-1169
as per my recent proposal. release.sgml itself is now just a stub that should
change rarely; ideally, only once per major release to add a new include line.
Most editing work will occur in the release-N.N.sgml files. To update a back
branch for a minor release, just copy the appropriate release-N.N.sgml
file(s) into the back branch.
This commit doesn't change the end-product documentation at all, only the
source layout. However, it makes it easy to start omitting ancient information
from newer branches' documentation, should we ever decide to do that.
recursion when we are unable to convert a localized error message to the
client's encoding. We've been over this ground before, but as reported by
Ibrar Ahmed, it still didn't work in the case of conversion failures for
the conversion-failure message itself :-(. Fix by installing a "circuit
breaker" that disables attempts to localize this message once we get into
recursion trouble.
Patch all supported branches, because it is in fact broken in all of them;
though I had to add some missing translations to the older branches in
order to expose the failure in the particular test case I was using.
require SELECT privilege as well, since you normally need to read existing
column values within such commands. This behavior is according to spec,
but we'd never documented it before. Per gripe from Volkan Yazici.
version ones, to make it clear to users just browsing the notes
that there are a lot more changes available from whatever version
they are at than what's in the minor version release notes.
Marc G. Fournier