Technical Description

Two vulnerabilities were identified in PostgreSQL, which may be exploited by local attackers to obtain elevated privileges or cause a denial of service. The first issue resides in the functions that support client-to-server character set conversion, and occurs when handling specially crafted arguments, which may be exploited by unprivileged users to execute arbitrary commands with elevated privileges. The second vulnerability resides in the "contrib/tsearch2" module, which incorrectly declares some functions as returning type "internal" when the functions do not have any "internal" argument. This issue may be exploited by local attackers to cause a denial of service by constructing SQL commands that invoke other functions accepting "internal" arguments.

Affected Products

PostgreSQL versions 7.x
PostgreSQL versions 8.x

Solution

Upgrade to PostgreSQL version 8.0.3, 7.4.8, 7.3.10 or 7.2.8 :
http://www.postgresql.org/download
Or fix the catalog entries manually :
http://www.postgresql.org/about/news.315

References

http://www.vupen.com/english/advisories/2005/0453
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/2005-05/msg00001.php
http://www.postgresql.org/about/news.322

Credits

Vulnerability reported by the vendor

ChangeLog

2005-05-03 : Initial release
2005-05-04 : Updated CVE
2005-05-12 : Updated Solution

Vulnerability Management

Subscribe to VUPEN VNS and receive real-time alerts when new advisories or patches relevant to your systems and network configurations are available.

Feedback

If you have additional information or corrections for this security advisory please submit them via our contact form.