PostgreSQL Fixed 'High-Exposure Security Vulnerability' Causing Denial-of-Service Attack (CVE-2013-1899)
Security researcher's have yet again figured out a serious security hole in one of most widely used object-relational database management system, PostgreSQL also known as Postgres. While manipulating the loophole an attacker can easily corrupt files and in some cases, can execute malicious code on underlying servers causing "persistent denial-of-service" attack. By corrupting the files an attacker can cause database server to crash and refuse to reboot. Affected servers could only be restarted by removing garbage text from the files or by restoring them from a backup. Versions 9.0, 9.1, and 9.2 are all vulnerable. As soon as this vulnerability get spotted, the developers at PostgreSQL immediately released updates while addressing a "high-exposure security vulnerability in versions 9.0 and later." The updates are available for 9.0, 9.1, and 9.2 branches, as well as 8.4. This updates also allow PostgreSQL to be built using Microsoft Visual Studio 2012. According to developers: "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." In addition to fixes for one major security issue, the updates also include four more minor security fixes, as well as fixes for other, non-security-related issues.
Some of these fixes include:
- A security vulnerability that made contrib/pgcrypto-generated strings too easy to guess;
- A vulnerability that would allow unprivileged users to interfere with backups;
- Security issues involving the OS X and Linux installers;
- Vaious issues with GiST indices;
- An issue related to crash recovery; and
- Memory and buffer leaks, among others.
The complete list of fixes and enhancements in each version can be found on the PostgreSQL release notes archive page. Also the patched PostgreSQL 9.2.4, 9.1.9, 9.0.13, and 8.4.17 are available now at download page. While talking about this fix, we would like to remind you that, late in last year another security vulnerability hit PostgreSQL database system, including versions 9.1.5, 9.0.9, 8.4.13 and 8.3.20. The security holes associated with libxml2 and libxslt. Along with that a vulnerability in the built-in XML functionality, and a vulnerability in the XSLT functionality supplied by the optional XML2 extension.
-Source (Campus Technology & The-H)