and CLUSTER) execute as the table owner rather than the calling user, using
the same privilege-switching mechanism already used for SECURITY DEFINER
functions. The purpose of this change is to ensure that user-defined
functions used in index definitions cannot acquire the privileges of a
superuser account that is performing routine maintenance. While a function
used in an index is supposed to be IMMUTABLE and thus not able to do anything
very interesting, there are several easy ways around that restriction; and
even if we could plug them all, there would remain a risk of reading sensitive
information and broadcasting it through a covert channel such as CPU usage.
To prevent bypassing this security measure, execution of SET SESSION
AUTHORIZATION and SET ROLE is now forbidden within a SECURITY DEFINER context.
Thanks to Itagaki Takahiro for reporting this vulnerability.
Security: CVE-2007-6600
This is needed to allow a security-definer function to set a truly secure
value of search_path. Without it, a malicious user can use temporary objects
to execute code with the privileges of the security-definer function. Even
pushing the temp schema to the back of the search path is not quite good
enough, because a function or operator at the back of the path might still
capture control from one nearer the front due to having a more exact datatype
match. Hence, disable searching the temp schema altogether for functions and
operators.
Security: CVE-2007-2138
and standard_conforming_strings. The encoding changes are needed for proper
escaping in multibyte encodings, as per the SQL-injection vulnerabilities
noted in CVE-2006-2313 and CVE-2006-2314. Concurrent fixes are being applied
to the server to ensure that it rejects queries that may have been corrupted
by attempted SQL injection, but this merely guarantees that unpatched clients
will fail rather than allow injection. An actual fix requires changing the
client-side code. While at it we have also fixed these routines to understand
about standard_conforming_strings, so that the upcoming changeover to SQL-spec
string syntax can be somewhat transparent to client code.
Since the existing API of PQescapeString and PQescapeBytea provides no way to
inform them which settings are in use, these functions are now deprecated in
favor of new functions PQescapeStringConn and PQescapeByteaConn. The new
functions take the PGconn to which the string will be sent as an additional
parameter, and look inside the connection structure to determine what to do.
So as to provide some functionality for clients using the old functions,
libpq stores the latest encoding and standard_conforming_strings values
received from the backend in static variables, and the old functions consult
these variables. This will work reliably in clients using only one Postgres
connection at a time, or even multiple connections if they all use the same
encoding and string syntax settings; which should cover many practical
scenarios.
Clients that use homebrew escaping methods, such as PHP's addslashes()
function or even hardwired regexp substitution, will require extra effort
to fix :-(. It is strongly recommended that such code be replaced by use of
PQescapeStringConn/PQescapeByteaConn if at all feasible.
parser will allow "\'" to be used to represent a literal quote mark. The
"\'" representation has been deprecated for some time in favor of the
SQL-standard representation "''" (two single quote marks), but it has been
used often enough that just disallowing it immediately won't do. Hence
backslash_quote allows the settings "on", "off", and "safe_encoding",
the last meaning to allow "\'" only if client_encoding is a valid server
encoding. That is now the default, and the reason is that in encodings
such as SJIS that allow 0x5c (ASCII backslash) to be the last byte of a
multibyte character, accepting "\'" allows SQL-injection attacks as per
CVE-2006-2314 (further details will be published after release). The
"on" setting is available for backward compatibility, but it must not be
used with clients that are exposed to untrusted input.
Thanks to Akio Ishida and Yasuo Ohgaki for identifying this security issue.
