MGASA-2014-0205

Updated postgresql packages fix security vulnerabilities:

Granting a role without ADMIN OPTION is supposed to prevent the grantee from adding or removing members from the granted role, but this restriction was easily bypassed by doing SET ROLE first. The security impact is mostly that a role member can revoke the access of others, contrary to the wishes of his grantor. Unapproved role member additions are a lesser concern, since an uncooperative role member could provide most of his rights to others anyway by creating views or SECURITY DEFINER functions (CVE-2014-0060).

The primary role of PL validator functions is to be called implicitly during CREATE FUNCTION, but they are also normal SQL functions that a user can call explicitly. Calling a validator on a function actually written in some other language was not checked for and could be exploited for privilege-escalation purposes. The fix involves adding a call to a privilege-checking function in each validator function. Non-core procedural languages will also need to make this change to their own validator functions, if any (CVE-2014-0061).

If the name lookups come to different conclusions due to concurrent activity, we might perform some parts of the DDL on a different table than other parts. At least in the case of CREATE INDEX, this can be used to cause the permissions checks to be performed against a different table than the index creation, allowing for a privilege escalation attack (CVE-2014-0062).

The MAXDATELEN constant was too small for the longest possible value of type interval, allowing a buffer overrun in interval_out(). Although the datetime input functions were more careful about avoiding buffer overrun, the limit was short enough to cause them to reject some valid inputs, such as input containing a very long timezone name. The ecpg library contained these vulnerabilities along with some of its own (CVE-2014-0063).

Several functions, mostly type input functions, calculated an allocation size without checking for overflow. If overflow did occur, a too-small buffer would be allocated and then written past (CVE-2014-0064).

Use strlcpy() and related functions to provide a clear guarantee that fixed-size buffers are not overrun. Unlike the preceding items, it is unclear whether these cases really represent live issues, since in most cases there appear to be previous constraints on the size of the input string. Nonetheless it seems prudent to silence all Coverity warnings of this type (CVE-2014-0065).

There are relatively few scenarios in which crypt() could return NULL, but contrib/chkpass would crash if it did. One practical case in which this could be an issue is if libc is configured to refuse to execute unapproved hashing algorithms (e.g., FIPS mode) (CVE-2014-0066).

Since the temporary server started by make check uses trust authentication, another user on the same machine could connect to it as database superuser, and then potentially exploit the privileges of the operating-system user who started the tests. A future release will probably incorporate changes in the testing procedure to prevent this risk, but some public discussion is needed first. So for the moment, just warn people against using make check when there are untrusted users on the same machine (CVE-2014-0067).

This update provides PostgreSQL versions 9.3.4, 9.2.8, 9.1.13, and 9.0.17 that fix these issues, as well as several others.

See the links in the upstream release announcements for more details.

The postgresql9.3 update also fixes an issue where the /var/run/postgresql directory was not created when the package is first installed (mga#13241).