The pg_start_backup() and pg_stop_backup() functions checked the privileges
of the initially-authenticated user rather than the current user, which is
wrong. For example, a user-defined index function could successfully call
these functions when executed by ANALYZE within autovacuum. This could
allow an attacker with valid but low-privilege database access to interfere
with creation of routine backups. Reported and fixed by Noah Misch.
Security: CVE-2013-1901
We failed to ever fill the sixth line (LISTEN_ADDR), which caused the
attempt to fill the seventh line (SHMEM_KEY) to fail, so that the shared
memory key never got added to the file in standalone mode. This has been
broken since we added more content to our lock files in 9.1.
To fix, tweak the logic in CreateLockFile to add an empty LISTEN_ADDR
line in standalone mode. This is a tad grotty, but since that function
already knows almost everything there is to know about the contents of
lock files, it doesn't seem that it's any better to hack it elsewhere.
It's not clear how significant this bug really is, since a standalone
backend should never have any children and thus it seems not critical
to be able to check the nattch count of the shmem segment externally.
But I'm going to back-patch the fix anyway.
This problem had escaped notice because of an ancient (and in hindsight
pretty dubious) decision to suppress LOG-level messages by default in
standalone mode; so that the elog(LOG) complaint in AddToDataDirLockFile
that should have warned of the problem didn't do anything. Fixing that
is material for a separate patch though.
Background workers are postmaster subprocesses that run arbitrary
user-specified code. They can request shared memory access as well as
backend database connections; or they can just use plain libpq frontend
database connections.
Modules listed in shared_preload_libraries can register background
workers in their _PG_init() function; this is early enough that it's not
necessary to provide an extra GUC option, because the necessary extra
resources can be allocated early on. Modules can install more than one
bgworker, if necessary.
Care is taken that these extra processes do not interfere with other
postmaster tasks: only one such process is started on each ServerLoop
iteration. This means a large number of them could be waiting to be
started up and postmaster is still able to quickly service external
connection requests. Also, shutdown sequence should not be impacted by
a worker process that's reasonably well behaved (i.e. promptly responds
to termination signals.)
The current implementation lets worker processes specify their start
time, i.e. at what point in the server startup process they are to be
started: right after postmaster start (in which case they mustn't ask
for shared memory access), when consistent state has been reached
(useful during recovery in a HOT standby server), or when recovery has
terminated (i.e. when normal backends are allowed).
In case of a bgworker crash, actions to take depend on registration
data: if shared memory was requested, then all other connections are
taken down (as well as other bgworkers), just like it were a regular
backend crashing. The bgworker itself is restarted, too, within a
configurable timeframe (which can be configured to be never).
More features to add to this framework can be imagined without much
effort, and have been discussed, but this seems good enough as a useful
unit already.
An elementary sample module is supplied.
Author: Álvaro Herrera
This patch is loosely based on prior patches submitted by KaiGai Kohei,
and unsubmitted code by Simon Riggs.
Reviewed by: KaiGai Kohei, Markus Wanner, Andres Freund,
Heikki Linnakangas, Simon Riggs, Amit Kapila
This reduces unnecessary exposure of other headers through htup.h, which
is very widely included by many files.
I have chosen to move the function prototypes to the new file as well,
because that means htup.h no longer needs to include tupdesc.h. In
itself this doesn't have much effect in indirect inclusion of tupdesc.h
throughout the tree, because it's also required by execnodes.h; but it's
something to explore in the future, and it seemed best to do the htup.h
change now while I'm busy with it.
Replace unix_socket_directory with unix_socket_directories, which is a list
of socket directories, and adjust postmaster's code to allow zero or more
Unix-domain sockets to be created.
This is mostly a straightforward change, but since the Unix sockets ought
to be created after the TCP/IP sockets for safety reasons (better chance
of detecting a port number conflict), AddToDataDirLockFile needs to be
fixed to support out-of-order updates of data directory lockfile lines.
That's a change that had been foreseen to be necessary someday anyway.
Honza Horak, reviewed and revised by Tom Lane
The accurate info about what's in a lock file has been in miscadmin.h
for some time, so let's just make this comment point there instead of
maintaining a duplicative copy.
Fix broken test for pre-existing postmaster, caused by wrong code for
appending lines to the lockfile; don't write a failed listen_address
setting into the lockfile; don't arbitrarily change the location of the
data directory in the lockfile compared to previous releases; provide more
consistent and useful definitions of the socket path and listen_address
entries; avoid assuming that pg_ctl has the same DEFAULT_PGSOCKET_DIR as
the postmaster; assorted code style improvements.
This privilege is required to do Streaming Replication, instead of
superuser, making it possible to set up a SR slave that doesn't
have write permissions on the master.
Superuser privileges do NOT override this check, so in order to
use the default superuser account for replication it must be
explicitly granted the REPLICATION permissions. This is backwards
incompatible change, in the interest of higher default security.
socket lockfile) when writing them. The lack of an fsync here may well
explain two different reports we've seen of corrupted lockfile contents,
which doesn't particularly bother the running server but can prevent a
new server from starting if the old one crashes. Per suggestion from
Alvaro.
Back-patch to all supported versions.
database to connect to. This is necessary for the walsender code to work
properly (it was previously using an untenable assumption that template1 would
always be available to connect to). This also gets rid of a small security
shortcoming that was introduced in the original patch to eliminate the flat
authentication files: before, you could find out whether or not the requested
database existed even if you couldn't pass the authentication checks.
The changes needed to support this are mainly just to treat pg_authid and
pg_auth_members as nailed relations, so that we can read them without having
to be able to locate real pg_class entries for them. This mechanism was
already debugged for pg_database, but we hadn't recognized the value of
applying it to those catalogs too.
Since the current code doesn't have support for accessing toast tables before
we've brought up all of the relcache, remove pg_authid's toast table to ensure
that no one can store an out-of-line toasted value of rolpassword. The case
seems quite unlikely to occur in practice, and was effectively unsupported
anyway in the old "flatfiles" implementation.
Update genbki.pl to actually implement the same rules as bootstrap.c does for
not-nullability of catalog columns. The previous coding was a bit cheesy but
worked all right for the previous set of bootstrap catalogs. It does not work
for pg_authid, where rolvaliduntil needs to be nullable.
Initdb forced due to minor catalog changes (mainly the toast table removal).
The purpose of this change is to eliminate the need for every caller
of SearchSysCache, SearchSysCacheCopy, SearchSysCacheExists,
GetSysCacheOid, and SearchSysCacheList to know the maximum number
of allowable keys for a syscache entry (currently 4). This will
make it far easier to increase the maximum number of keys in a
future release should we choose to do so, and it makes the code
shorter, too.
Design and review by Tom Lane.
of shared or nailed system catalogs. This has two key benefits:
* The new CLUSTER-based VACUUM FULL can be applied safely to all catalogs.
* We no longer have to use an unsafe reindex-in-place approach for reindexing
shared catalogs.
CLUSTER on nailed catalogs now works too, although I left it disabled on
shared catalogs because the resulting pg_index.indisclustered update would
only be visible in one database.
Since reindexing shared system catalogs is now fully transactional and
crash-safe, the former special cases in REINDEX behavior have been removed;
shared catalogs are treated the same as non-shared.
This commit does not do anything about the recently-discussed problem of
deadlocks between VACUUM FULL/CLUSTER on a system catalog and other
concurrent queries; will address that in a separate patch. As a stopgap,
parallel_schedule has been tweaked to run vacuum.sql by itself, to avoid
such failures during the regression tests.
an allegedly immutable index function. It was previously recognized that
we had to prevent such a function from executing SET/RESET ROLE/SESSION
AUTHORIZATION, or it could trivially obtain the privileges of the session
user. However, since there is in general no privilege checking for changes
of session-local state, it is also possible for such a function to change
settings in a way that might subvert later operations in the same session.
Examples include changing search_path to cause an unexpected function to
be called, or replacing an existing prepared statement with another one
that will execute a function of the attacker's choosing.
The present patch secures VACUUM, ANALYZE, and CREATE INDEX/REINDEX against
these threats, which are the same places previously deemed to need protection
against the SET ROLE issue. GUC changes are still allowed, since there are
many useful cases for that, but we prevent security problems by forcing a
rollback of any GUC change after completing the operation. Other cases are
handled by throwing an error if any change is attempted; these include temp
table creation, closing a cursor, and creating or deleting a prepared
statement. (In 7.4, the infrastructure to roll back GUC changes doesn't
exist, so we settle for rejecting changes of "search_path" in these contexts.)
Original report and patch by Gurjeet Singh, additional analysis by
Tom Lane.
Security: CVE-2009-4136
Create a new catalog pg_db_role_setting where they are now stored, and better
encapsulate the code that deals with settings into its realm. The old
datconfig and rolconfig columns are removed.
psql has gained a \drds command to display the settings.
Backwards compatibility warning: while the backwards-compatible system views
still have the config columns, they no longer completely represent the
configuration for a user or database.
Catalog version bumped.
script.
To do this, have pg_ctl pass down its parent shell's PID in an environment
variable PG_GRANDPARENT_PID, and teach CreateLockFile() to disregard that PID
as a false match if it finds it in postmaster.pid. This allows us to cope
with one level of postgres-owned shell process even with pg_ctl in the way,
so it's just as safe as starting the postmaster directly. You still have to
be careful about how you write the initscript though.
Adjust the comments in contrib/start-scripts/ to not deprecate use of
pg_ctl. Also, fix the ROTATELOGS option in the OSX script, which was
indulging in exactly the sort of unsafe coding that renders this fix
pointless :-(. A pipe inside the "sudo" will probably result in more
than one postgres-owned process hanging around.
To make this work in the base case, pg_database now has a nailed-in-cache
relation descriptor that is initialized using hardwired knowledge in
relcache.c. This means pg_database is added to the set of relations that
need to have a Schema_pg_xxx macro maintained in pg_attribute.h. When this
path is taken, we'll have to do a seqscan of pg_database to find the row
we need.
In the normal case, we are able to do an indexscan to find the database's row
by name. This is made possible by storing a global relcache init file that
describes only the shared catalogs and their indexes (and therefore is usable
by all backends in any database). A new backend loads this cache file,
finds its database OID after an indexscan on pg_database, and then loads
the local relcache init file for that database.
This change should effectively eliminate number of databases as a factor
in backend startup time, even with large numbers of databases. However,
the real reason for doing it is as a first step towards getting rid of
the flat files altogether. There are still several other sub-projects
to be tackled before that can happen.
already did that on Windows, but it's needed on other platforms too when
LC_CTYPE=C. With other locales, we enforce (or trust) that the codeset of
the locale matches the server encoding so we don't need to bind it
explicitly. It should do no harm in that case either, but I don't have
full faith in the PG encoding -> OS codeset mapping table yet. Per recent
discussion on pgsql-hackers.
when loaded via shared_preload_libraries. Needed for support of
pg_stat_statements, or pretty much anything else that wants a GUC to
control size of a shared memory allocation.
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
transaction, unless rolled back or overridden by a SET clause for the same
variable attached to a surrounding function call. Per discussion, these
seem the best semantics. Note that this is an INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: in 8.0
through 8.2, SET LOCAL's effects disappeared at subtransaction commit
(leading to behavior that made little sense at the SQL level).
I took advantage of the opportunity to rewrite and simplify the GUC variable
save/restore logic a little bit. The old idea of a "tentative" value is gone;
it was a hangover from before we had a stack. Also, we no longer need a stack
entry for every nesting level, but only for those in which a variable's value
actually changed.
There are still some loose ends: I didn't do anything about the SET FROM
CURRENT idea yet, and it's not real clear whether we are happy with the
interaction of SET LOCAL with function-local settings. The documentation
is a bit spartan, too.
continuously, and requests vacuum runs of "autovacuum workers" to postmaster.
The workers do the actual vacuum work. This allows for future improvements,
like allowing multiple autovacuum jobs running in parallel.
For now, the code keeps the original behavior of having a single autovac
process at any time by sleeping until the previous worker has finished.
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".
such as debugging and performance measurement. This consists of two features:
a table of "rendezvous variables" that allows separately-loaded shared
libraries to communicate, and a new GUC setting "local_preload_libraries"
that allows libraries to be loaded into specific sessions without explicit
cooperation from the client application. To make local_preload_libraries
as flexible as possible, we do not restrict its use to superusers; instead,
it is restricted to load only libraries stored in $libdir/plugins/. The
existing LOAD command has also been modified to allow non-superusers to
LOAD libraries stored in this directory.
This patch also renames the existing GUC variable preload_libraries to
shared_preload_libraries (after a suggestion by Simon Riggs) and does some
code refactoring in dfmgr.c to improve clarity.
Korry Douglas, with a little help from Tom Lane.
