It's not terribly hard to devise regular expressions that take large
amounts of time and/or memory to process. Recent testing by Greg Stark has
also shown that machines with small stack limits can be driven to stack
overflow by suitably crafted regexps. While we intend to fix these things
as much as possible, it's probably impossible to eliminate slow-execution
cases altogether. In any case we don't want to treat such things as
security issues. The history of that code should already discourage
prudent DBAs from allowing execution of regexp patterns coming from
possibly-hostile sources, but it seems like a good idea to warn about the
hazard explicitly.
Currently, similar_escape() allows access to enough of the underlying
regexp behavior that the warning has to apply to SIMILAR TO as well.
We might be able to make it safer if we tightened things up to allow only
SQL-mandated capabilities in SIMILAR TO; but that would be a subtly
non-backwards-compatible change, so it requires discussion and probably
could not be back-patched.
Per discussion among pgsql-security list.
Previously it was documented that the details on HeapTupleHeaderData
struct could be found in htup.h. This is not correct because it's now
defined in htup_details.h.
Back-patch to 9.3 where the definition of HeapTupleHeaderData struct
was moved from htup.h to htup_details.h.
Michael Paquier
The docs claimed that \uhhhh would be interpreted as a Unicode value
regardless of the database encoding, but it's never been implemented
that way: \uhhhh and \xhhhh actually mean exactly the same thing, namely
the character that pg_mb2wchar translates to 0xhhhh. Moreover we were
falsely dismissive of the usefulness of Unicode code points above FFFF.
Fix that.
It's been like this for ages, so back-patch to all supported branches.
The default argument, if given, has to be of exactly the same datatype
as the first argument; but this was not stated in so many words, and
the error message you get about it might not lead your thought in the
right direction. Per bug #13587 from Robert McGehee.
A quick scan says that these are the only two built-in functions with two
anyelement arguments and no other polymorphic arguments. There are plenty
of cases of, eg, anyarray and anyelement, but those seem less likely to
confuse. For instance this doesn't seem terribly hard to figure out:
"function array_remove(integer[], numeric) does not exist". So I've
contented myself with fixing these two cases.
This behavior wasn't documented, but it should be because it's user-visible
in triggers and other functions executed on the remote server.
Per question from Adam Fuchs.
Back-patch to 9.3 where postgres_fdw was added.
The table-rewriting forms of ALTER TABLE are MVCC-unsafe, in much the same
way as TRUNCATE, because they replace all rows of the table with newly-made
rows with a new xmin. (Ideally, concurrent transactions with old snapshots
would continue to see the old table contents, but the data is not there
anymore --- and if it were there, it would be inconsistent with the table's
updated rowtype, so there would be serious implementation problems to fix.)
This was nowhere documented though, and the problem was only documented for
TRUNCATE in a note in the TRUNCATE reference page. Create a new "Caveats"
section in the MVCC chapter that can be home to this and other limitations
on serializable consistency.
In passing, fix a mistaken statement that VACUUM and CLUSTER would reclaim
space occupied by a dropped column. They don't reconstruct existing tuples
so they couldn't do that.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Although initdb has long discouraged use of a filesystem mount-point
directory as a PG data directory, this point was covered nowhere in the
user-facing documentation. Also, with the popularity of pg_upgrade,
we really need to recommend that the PG user own not only the data
directory but its parent directory too. (Without a writable parent
directory, operations such as "mv data data.old" fail immediately.
pg_upgrade itself doesn't do that, but wrapper scripts for it often do.)
Hence, adjust the "Creating a Database Cluster" section to address
these points. I also took the liberty of wordsmithing the discussion
of NFS a bit.
These considerations aren't by any means new, so back-patch to all
supported branches.
While postgres' use of SSL renegotiation is a good idea in theory, it
turned out to not work well in practice. The specification and openssl's
implementation of it have lead to several security issues. Postgres' use
of renegotiation also had its share of bugs.
Additionally OpenSSL has a bunch of bugs around renegotiation, reported
and open for years, that regularly lead to connections breaking with
obscure error messages. We tried increasingly complex workarounds to get
around these bugs, but we didn't find anything complete.
Since these connection breakages often lead to hard to debug problems,
e.g. spuriously failing base backups and significant latency spikes when
synchronous replication is used, we have decided to change the default
setting for ssl renegotiation to 0 (disabled) in the released
backbranches and remove it entirely in 9.5 and master..
Author: Michael Paquier, with changes by me
Discussion: 20150624144148.GQ4797@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 9.0-9.4; 9.5 and master get a different patch
The documentation implied that there was seldom any reason to use the
array_append, array_prepend, and array_cat functions directly. But that's
not really true, because they can help make it clear which case is meant,
which the || operator can't do since it's overloaded to represent all three
cases. Add some discussion and examples illustrating the potentially
confusing behavior that can ensue if the parser misinterprets what was
meant.
Per a complaint from Michael Herold. Back-patch to 9.2, which is where ||
started to behave this way.
Tom fixed another one of these in commit 7f32dbcd, but there was another
almost identical one in libpq docs. Per his comment:
HP's web server has apparently become case-sensitive sometime recently.
Per bug #13479 from Daniel Abraham. Corrected link identified by Alvaro.
The .backup file name can be passed to pg_archivecleanup even if
it includes the extension which is specified in -x option.
However, previously the document incorrectly warned a user
not to do that.
Back-patch to 9.2 where pg_archivecleanup's -x option and
the warning were added.
Of course, what it removes is leading zeroes. Seems to have been a thinko
in commit ffe92d15d53625d5ae0c23f4e1984ed43614a33d. Noted by Hubert Depesz
Lubaczewski.
- Correct the name of directory which those catalog columns allow to be shrunk.
- Correct the name of symbol which is used as the value of pg_class.relminmxid
when the relation is not a table.
- Fix "ID ID" typo.
Backpatch to 9.3 where those cataog columns were introduced.
Also sneak entries for commits 97ff2a564 et al into the sections for
the previous releases in the relevant branches. Those fixes did go out
in the previous releases, but missed getting documented.
This has been the predominant outcome. When the output of decrypting
with a wrong key coincidentally resembled an OpenPGP packet header,
pgcrypto could instead report "Corrupt data", "Not text data" or
"Unsupported compression algorithm". The distinct "Corrupt data"
message added no value. The latter two error messages misled when the
decrypted payload also exhibited fundamental integrity problems. Worse,
error message variance in other systems has enabled cryptologic attacks;
see RFC 4880 section "14. Security Considerations". Whether these
pgcrypto behaviors are likewise exploitable is unknown.
In passing, document that pgcrypto does not resist side-channel attacks.
Back-patch to 9.0 (all supported versions).
Security: CVE-2015-3167
Analysis by Noah Misch shows that the 25% threshold set by commit
53bb309d2d5a9432d2602c93ed18e58bd2924e15 is lower than any other,
similar autovac threshold. While we don't know exactly what value
will be optimal for all users, it is better to err a little on the
high side than on the low side. A higher value increases the risk
that users might exhaust the available space and start seeing errors
before autovacuum can clean things up sufficiently, but a user who
hits that problem can compensate for it by reducing
autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age to a value dependent on their
average multixact size. On the flip side, if the emergency cap
imposed by that patch kicks in too early, the user will experience
excessive wraparound scanning and will be unable to mitigate that
problem by configuration. The new value will hopefully reduce the
risk of such bad experiences while still providing enough headroom
to avoid multixact member exhaustion for most users.
Along the way, adjust the documentation to reflect the effects of
commit 04e6d3b877e060d8445eb653b7ea26b1ee5cec6b, which taught
autovacuum to run for multixact wraparound even when autovacuum
is configured off.
As discussed, the default setting of include_realm=0 can be dangerous in
multi-realm environments because it is then impossible to differentiate
users with the same username but who are from two different realms.
Recommend include_realm=1 and note that the default setting may change
in a future version of PostgreSQL and therefore users may wish to
explicitly set include_realm to avoid issues while upgrading.
The logic introduced in commit b69bf30b9bfacafc733a9ba77c9587cf54d06c0c
and repaired in commits 669c7d20e6374850593cb430d332e11a3992bbcf and
7be47c56af3d3013955c91c2877c08f2a0e3e6a2 helps to ensure that we don't
overwrite old multixact member information while it is still needed,
but a user who creates many large multixacts can still exhaust the
member space (and thus start getting errors) while autovacuum stands
idly by.
To fix this, progressively ramp down the effective value (but not the
actual contents) of autovacuum_multixact_freeze_max_age as member space
utilization increases. This makes autovacuum more aggressive and also
reduces the threshold for a manual VACUUM to perform a full-table scan.
This patch leaves unsolved the problem of ensuring that emergency
autovacuums are triggered even when autovacuum=off. We'll need to fix
that via a separate patch.
Thomas Munro and Robert Haas
psql was already accepting conninfo strings as the first parameter in
\connect, but the way it worked wasn't sane; some of the other
parameters would get the previous connection's values, causing it to
connect to a completely unexpected server or, more likely, not finding
any server at all because of completely wrong combinations of
parameters.
Fix by explicitely checking for a conninfo-looking parameter in the
dbname position; if one is found, use its complete specification rather
than mix with the other arguments. Also, change tab-completion to not
try to complete conninfo/URI-looking "dbnames" and document that
conninfos are accepted as first argument.
There was a weak consensus to backpatch this, because while the behavior
of using the dbname as a conninfo is nowhere documented for \connect, it
is reasonable to expect that it works because it does work in many other
contexts. Therefore this is backpatched all the way back to 9.0.
To implement this, routines previously private to libpq have been
duplicated so that psql can decide what looks like a conninfo/URI
string. In back branches, just duplicate the same code all the way back
to 9.2, where URIs where introduced; 9.0 and 9.1 have a simpler version.
In master, the routines are moved to src/common and renamed.
Author: David Fetter, Andrew Dunstan. Some editorialization by me
(probably earning a Gierth's "Sloppy" badge in the process.)
Reviewers: Andrew Gierth, Erik Rijkers, Pavel Stěhule, Stephen Frost,
Robert Haas, Andrew Dunstan.
You're required to write either RANGE or ROWS to start a frame clause,
but the documentation incorrectly implied this is optional. Noted by
David Johnston.
The SGML docs claimed that 1-byte integers could be sent or received with
the "isint" options, but no such behavior has ever been implemented in
pqGetInt() or pqPutInt(). The in-code documentation header for PQfn() was
even less in tune with reality, and the code itself used parameter names
matching neither the SGML docs nor its libpq-fe.h declaration. Do a bit
of additional wordsmithing on the SGML docs while at it.
Since the business about 1-byte integers is a clear documentation bug,
back-patch to all supported branches.
Since 9.1, we've provided extensions with a way to denote
"configuration" tables- tables created by an extension which the user
may modify. By marking these as "configuration" tables, the extension
is asking for the data in these tables to be pg_dump'd (tables which
are not marked in this way are assumed to be entirely handled during
CREATE EXTENSION and are not included at all in a pg_dump).
Unfortunately, pg_dump neglected to consider foreign key relationships
between extension configuration tables and therefore could end up
trying to reload the data in an order which would cause FK violations.
This patch teaches pg_dump about these dependencies, so that the data
dumped out is done so in the best order possible. Note that there's no
way to handle circular dependencies, but those have yet to be seen in
the wild.
The release notes for this should include a caution to users that
existing pg_dump-based backups may be invalid due to this issue. The
data is all there, but restoring from it will require extracting the
data for the configuration tables and then loading them in the correct
order by hand.
Discussed initially back in bug #6738, more recently brought up by
Gilles Darold, who provided an initial patch which was further reworked
by Michael Paquier. Further modifications and documentation updates
by me.
Back-patch to 9.1 where we added the concept of extension configuration
tables.
If libpq output buffer is full, pqSendSome() function tries to drain any
incoming data. This avoids deadlock, if the server e.g. sends a lot of
NOTICE messages, and blocks until we read them. However, pqSendSome() only
did that in blocking mode. In non-blocking mode, the deadlock could still
happen.
To fix, take a two-pronged approach:
1. Change the documentation to instruct that when PQflush() returns 1, you
should wait for both read- and write-ready, and call PQconsumeInput() if it
becomes read-ready. That fixes the deadlock, but applications are not going
to change overnight.
2. In pqSendSome(), drain the input buffer before returning 1. This
alleviates the problem for applications that only wait for write-ready. In
particular, a slow but steady stream of NOTICE messages during COPY FROM
STDIN will no longer cause a deadlock. The risk remains that the server
attempts to send a large burst of data and fills its output buffer, and at
the same time the client also sends enough data to fill its output buffer.
The application will deadlock if it goes to sleep, waiting for the socket
to become write-ready, before the server's data arrives. In practice,
NOTICE messages and such that the server might be sending are usually
short, so it's highly unlikely that the server would fill its output buffer
so quickly.
Backpatch to all supported versions.
In investigating yesterday's crash report from Hugo Osvaldo Barrera, I only
looked back as far as commit f3aec2c7f51904e7 where the breakage occurred
(which is why I thought the IPv4-in-IPv6 business was undocumented). But
actually the logic dates back to commit 3c9bb8886df7d56a and was simply
broken by erroneous refactoring in the later commit. A bit of archives
excavation shows that we added the whole business in response to a report
that some 2003-era Linux kernels would report IPv4 connections as having
IPv4-in-IPv6 addresses. The fact that we've had no complaints since 9.0
seems to be sufficient confirmation that no modern kernels do that, so
let's just rip it all out rather than trying to fix it.
Do this in the back branches too, thus essentially deciding that our
effective behavior since 9.0 is correct. If there are any platforms on
which the kernel reports IPv4-in-IPv6 addresses as such, yesterday's fix
would have made for a subtle and potentially security-sensitive change in
the effective meaning of IPv4 pg_hba.conf entries, which does not seem like
a good thing to do in minor releases. So let's let the post-9.0 behavior
stand, and change the documentation to match it.
In passing, I failed to resist the temptation to wordsmith the description
of pg_hba.conf IPv4 and IPv6 address entries a bit. A lot of this text
hasn't been touched since we were IPv4-only.
When ecpg was rewritten to the new protocol version not all variable types
were corrected. This patch rewrites the code for these types to fix that. It
also fixes the documentation to correctly tell the status of array handling.
When beginning streaming replication, the client usually issues the
IDENTIFY_SYSTEM command, which used to return the current WAL insert
position. That's not suitable for the intended purpose of that field,
however. pg_receivexlog uses it to start replication from the reported
point, but if it hasn't been flushed to disk yet, it will fail. Change
IDENTIFY_SYSTEM to report the flush position instead.
Backpatch to 9.1 and above. 9.0 doesn't report any WAL position.
The previous wording claimed that the file was always in /etc, but of
course this varies with the installation layout. Write instead that it
can be found via `pg_config --sysconfdir`. Even though this is still
somewhat incorrect because it doesn't account of moved installations, it
at least conveys that the location depends on the installation.
