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
This change was previously committed to HEAD, but the consensus seems to be
in favor of back-patching it. I'm only backpatching as far as 8.3.X, however,
because it's not clear to me to what degree this advice applies to older
branches, and in any case our first advice to anyone attempting to tune those
versions is likely to be "upgrade".
how often we do SSL session key renegotiation. Can be set to
0 to disable renegotiation completely, which is required if
a broken SSL library is used (broken patches to CVE-2009-3555
a known cause) or when using a client library that can't do
renegotiation.
pginstaller isn't used anymore, in favor of the one-click installers.
Make it clear that we support Windows 2000 and newer with the native
port, instead of first saying we support NT4 and then saying we don't.
CREATE FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER. Arguably it wasn't a bug because the
documentation said that it's passed the catalog ID or zero, but surely
we should provide it when it's known. And there isn't currently any
scenario where it's not known, and I can't imagine having one in the
future either, so better remove the "or zero" escape hatch and always
pass a valid catalog ID. Backpatch to 8.4.
Martin Pihlak
git mirror.
Remove information about cvsup and documentation that's more about cvs
than our use of cvs.
Backpatch to 8.4 so we get the git information up on the website as
soon as possible.
for example in
WITH w AS (SELECT * FROM foo) SELECT * FROM w, bar ... FOR UPDATE
the FOR UPDATE will now affect bar but not foo. This is more useful and
consistent than the original 8.4 behavior, which tried to propagate FOR UPDATE
into the WITH query but always failed due to assorted implementation
restrictions. Even though we are in process of removing those restrictions,
it seems correct on philosophical grounds to not let the outer query's
FOR UPDATE affect the WITH query.
In passing, fix isLockedRel which frequently got things wrong in
nested-subquery cases: "FOR UPDATE OF foo" applies to an alias foo in the
current query level, not subqueries. This has been broken for a long time,
but it doesn't seem worth back-patching further than 8.4 because the actual
consequences are minimal. At worst the parser would sometimes get
RowShareLock on a relation when it should be AccessShareLock or vice versa.
That would only make a difference if someone were using ExclusiveLock
concurrently, which no standard operation does, and anyway FOR UPDATE
doesn't result in visible changes so it's not clear that the someone would
notice any problem. Between that and the fact that FOR UPDATE barely works
with subqueries at all in existing releases, I'm not excited about worrying
about it.
in CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION. The original code would update pg_shdepend
as if a new function was being created, even if it wasn't, with two bad
consequences: pg_shdepend might record the wrong owner for the function,
and any dependencies for roles mentioned in the function's ACL would be lost.
The fix is very easy: just don't touch pg_shdepend at all when doing a
function replacement.
Also update the CREATE FUNCTION reference page, which never explained
exactly what changes and doesn't change in a function replacement.
In passing, fix the CREATE VIEW reference page similarly; there's no
code bug there, but the docs didn't say what happens.
to unload and re-load the library.
The difficulty with unloading a library is that we haven't defined safe
protocols for doing so. In particular, there's no safe mechanism for
getting out of a "hook" function pointer unless libraries are unloaded
in reverse order of loading. And there's no mechanism at all for undefining
a custom GUC variable, so GUC would be left with a pointer to an old value
that might or might not still be valid, and very possibly wouldn't be in
the same place anymore.
While the unload and reload behavior had some usefulness in easing
development of new loadable libraries, it's of no use whatever to normal
users, so just disabling it isn't giving up that much. Someday we might
care to expend the effort to develop safe unload protocols; but even if
we did, there'd be little certainty that every third-party loadable module
was following them, so some security restrictions would still be needed.
Back-patch to 8.2; before that, LOAD was superuser-only anyway.
Security: unprivileged users could crash backend. CVE not assigned yet
so that their elements are always taken as simple expressions over the
query's input columns. It originally seemed like a good idea to make them
act exactly like GROUP BY and ORDER BY, right down to the SQL92-era behavior
of accepting output column names or numbers. However, that was not such a
great idea, for two reasons:
1. It permits circular references, as exhibited in bug #5018: the output
column could be the one containing the window function itself. (We actually
had a regression test case illustrating this, but nobody thought twice about
how confusing that would be.)
2. It doesn't seem like a good idea for, eg, "lead(foo) OVER (ORDER BY foo)"
to potentially use two completely different meanings for "foo".
Accordingly, narrow down the behavior of window clauses to use only the
SQL99-compliant interpretation that the expressions are simple expressions.
Instead of sending stdout/stderr to /dev/null after forking away from the
terminal, send them to postmaster.log within the data directory. Since
this opens the door to indefinite logfile bloat, recommend even more
strongly that log output be redirected when using silent_mode.
Move the postmaster's initial calls of load_hba() and load_ident() down
to after we have started the log collector, if we are going to. This
is so that errors reported by them will appear in the "usual" place.
Reclassify silent_mode as a LOGGING_WHERE, not LOGGING_WHEN, parameter,
since it's got absolutely nothing to do with the latter category.
In passing, fix some obsolete references to -S ... this option hasn't
had that switch letter for a long time.
Back-patch to 8.4, since as of 8.4 load_hba() and load_ident() are more
picky (and thus more likely to fail) than they used to be. This entire
change was driven by a complaint about those errors disappearing into
the bit bucket.