
We had a report of confusing server behavior caused by a client bug that sent junk to the server: the server thought the junk was a very long message length and waited patiently for data that would never come. We can reduce the risk of that by being less trusting about message lengths. For a long time, libpq has had a heuristic rule that it wouldn't believe large message size words, except for a small number of message types that are expected to be (potentially) long. This provides some defense against loss of message-boundary sync and other corrupted-data cases. The server does something similar, except that up to now it only limited the lengths of messages received during the connection authentication phase. Let's do the same as in libpq and put restrictions on the allowed length of all messages, while distinguishing between message types that are expected to be long and those that aren't. I used a limit of 10000 bytes for non-long messages. (libpq's corresponding limit is 30000 bytes, but given the asymmetry of the FE/BE protocol, there's no good reason why the numbers should be the same.) Experimentation suggests that this is at least a factor of 10, maybe a factor of 100, more than we really need; but plenty of daylight seems desirable to avoid false positives. In any case we can adjust the limit based on beta-test results. For long messages, set a limit of MaxAllocSize - 1, which is the most that we can absorb into the StringInfo buffer that the message is collected in. This just serves to make sure that a bogus message size is reported as such, rather than as a confusing gripe about not being able to enlarge a string buffer. While at it, make sure that non-mainline code paths (such as COPY FROM STDIN) are as paranoid as SocketBackend is, and validate the message type code before believing the message length. This provides an additional guard against getting stuck on corrupted input. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2003757.1619373089@sss.pgh.pa.us
PostgreSQL Database Management System ===================================== This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL database management system. PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions. This distribution also contains C language bindings. PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here: https://www.postgresql.org/download/ See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install PostgreSQL. That file also lists supported operating systems and hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL system. Copyright and license information can be found in the file COPYRIGHT. A comprehensive documentation set is included in this distribution; it can be read as described in the installation instructions. The latest version of this software may be obtained at https://www.postgresql.org/download/. For more information look at our web site located at https://www.postgresql.org/.
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