Technical Description

Multiple vulnerabilities have been identified in PostgreSQL, which could be exploited by malicious users to bypass security restrictions, gain elevated privileges or cause a denial of service.

The first issue is caused by an error within the index functions that are executed with the privileges of the superuser during "VACUUM" and "ANALYZE", which could be exploited to obtain elevated privileges.

The second vulnerability is caused due to the SET ROLE and SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION being permitted within index functions, which could be exploited to obtain elevated privileges.

The third issue is caused by errors in the regular expression libraries, which could be exploited by attackers to crash a vulnerable backend or exhaust all available memory resources and create a denial of service condition by passing certain regular expressions to SQL queries.

The fourth vulnerability is caused by an error when handling certain DBLink functions combined with local trust or ident authentication, which could allow a malicious user to gain superuser privileges.

Affected Products

PostgreSQL version 8.2
PostgreSQL version 8.1
PostgreSQL version 8.0
PostgreSQL version 7.4

Solution

Upgrade to PostgreSQL version 8.2.6, 8.1.11, 8.0.15, 7.4.19, or 7.3.21 :
http://www.postgresql.org/download

References

http://www.vupen.com/english/advisories/2008/0061
http://www.postgresql.org/about/news.905

Credits

Vulnerabilities reported by the vendor.

ChangeLog

2008-01-08 : Initial release

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