The regex code didn't have any provision for query cancel; which is
unsurprising given its non-Postgres origin, but still problematic since
some operations can take a long time. Introduce a callback function to
check for a pending query cancel or session termination request, and
call it in a couple of strategic spots where we can make the regex code
exit with an error indicator.
If we ever actually split out the regex code as a standalone library,
some additional work will be needed to let the cancel callback function
be specified externally to the library. But that's straightforward
(certainly so by comparison to putting the locale-dependent character
classification logic on a similar arms-length basis), and there seems
no need to do it right now.
A bigger issue is that there may be more places than these two where
we need to check for cancels. We can always add more checks later,
now that the infrastructure is in place.
Since there are known examples of not-terribly-long regexes that can
lock up a backend for a long time, back-patch to all supported branches.
I have hopes of fixing the known performance problems later, but adding
query cancel ability seems like a good idea even if they were all fixed.
are shared with Tcl, since it's their code to begin with, and the patches
have been copied from Tcl 8.5.0. Problems:
CVE-2007-4769: Inadequate check on the range of backref numbers allows
crash due to out-of-bounds read.
CVE-2007-4772: Infinite loop in regex optimizer for pattern '($|^)*'.
CVE-2007-6067: Very slow optimizer cleanup for regex with a large NFA
representation, as well as crash if we encounter an out-of-memory condition
during NFA construction.
Part of the response to CVE-2007-6067 is to put a limit on the number of
states in the NFA representation of a regex. This seems needed even though
the within-the-code problems have been corrected, since otherwise the code
could try to use very large amounts of memory for a suitably-crafted regex,
leading to potential DOS by driving the system into swap, activating a kernel
OOM killer, etc.
Although there are certainly plenty of ways to drive the system into effective
DOS with poorly-written SQL queries, these problems seem worth treating as
security issues because many applications might accept regex search patterns
from untrustworthy sources.
Thanks to Will Drewry of Google for reporting these problems. Patches by Will
Drewry and Tom Lane.
Security: CVE-2007-4769, CVE-2007-4772, CVE-2007-6067
Standard English uses "may", "can", and "might" in different ways:
may - permission, "You may borrow my rake."
can - ability, "I can lift that log."
might - possibility, "It might rain today."
Unfortunately, in conversational English, their use is often mixed, as
in, "You may use this variable to do X", when in fact, "can" is a better
choice. Similarly, "It may crash" is better stated, "It might crash".
(extracted from Tcl 8.4.1 release, as Henry still hasn't got round to
making it a separate library). This solves a performance problem for
multibyte, as well as upgrading our regexp support to match recent Tcl
and nearly match recent Perl.
