PostgreSQL: PostgreSQL 9.2.4, 9.1.9, 9.0.13 and 8.4.17 released

Posted on 2013-04-04

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released a security update to all current versions of the PostgreSQL database system, including versions 9.2.4, 9.1.9, 9.0.13, and 8.4.17. This update fixes a high-exposure security vulnerability in versions 9.0 and later. All users of the affected versions are strongly urged to apply the update immediately.

A major security issue fixed in this release, CVE-2013-1899, makes it possible for a connection request containing a database name that begins with "-" to be crafted that can damage or destroy files within a server's data directory. Anyone with access to the port the PostgreSQL server listens on can initiate this request. This issue was discovered by Mitsumasa Kondo and Kyotaro Horiguchi of NTT Open Source Software Center.

Two lesser security fixes are also included in this release: CVE-2013-1900, wherein random numbers generated by contrib/pgcrypto functions may be easy for another database user to guess, and CVE-2013-1901, which mistakenly allows an unprivileged user to run commands that could interfere with in-progress backups. Finally, this release fixes two security issues with the graphical installers for Linux and Mac OS X: insecure passing of superuser passwords to a script, CVE-2013-1903 and the use of predictable filenames in /tmp CVE-2013-1902. Marko Kreen, Noah Misch and Stefan Kaltenbrunner reported these issues, respectively.

We are grateful for each developer's efforts in making PostgreSQL more secure.

This release also corrects several errors in management of GiST indexes. After installing this update, it is advisable to REINDEX any GiST indexes that meet one or more of the conditions described below.

This update release also contains fixes for many minor issues discovered and patched by the PostgreSQL community in the last two months, including:

• Fix GiST indexes to not use "fuzzy" geometric comparisons for box, polygon, circle, and point columns
• Fix bugs in contrib/btree_gist for GiST indexes on text, bytea, bit, and numeric columns
• Fix bugs in page splitting code for multi-column GiST indexes
• Fix buffer leak in WAL replay causing "incorrect local pin count" errors
• Ensure crash recovery before entering archive recovery during unclean shutdown when recovery.conf is present
• Avoid deleting not-yet-archived WAL files during crash recovery
• Fix race condition in DELETE RETURNING
• Fix possible planner crash after adding columns to a view depending on another view
• Eliminate memory leaks in PL/Perl's spi_prepare() function
• Fix pg_dumpall to handle database names containing "=" correctly
• Avoid crash in pg_dump when an incorrect connection string is given
• Ignore invalid indexes in pg_dump and pg_upgrade
• Include only the current server version's subdirectory when backing up a tablespace with pg_basebackup
• Add a server version check in pg_basebackup and pg_receivexlog
• Fix contrib/dblink to handle inconsistent settings of DateStyle or IntervalStyle safely
• Fix contrib/pg_trgm's similarity() function to return zero for trigram-less strings
• Enable building PostgreSQL with Microsoft Visual Studio 2012
• Update time zone data files for DST law changes in Chile, Haiti, Morocco, Paraguay, and some Russian areas

As always, update releases only require installation of packages and a database system restart. You do not need to dump/restore or use pg_upgrade for this update release. Users who have skipped multiple update releases may need to perform additional, post-update steps; see the Release Notes for details.

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