Security Issues
---------------
Two security holes have been closed by this release:
CVE-2016-5423: certain nested CASE expressions can cause the server to crash.
CVE-2016-5424: database and role names with embedded special characters can allow code injection during administrative operations like pg_dumpall.
The fix for the second issue also adds an option, -reuse-previous, to psql's \connect command. pg_dumpall will also refuse to handle database and role names containing line breaks after the update. For more information on these issues and how they affect backwards-compatibility, see the Release Notes.
Bug Fixes and Improvements
--------------------------
This update also fixes a number of bugs reported in the last few months. Some of these issues affect only version 9.5, but many affect all supported versions:
Fix misbehaviors of IS NULL/IS NOT NULL with composite values
Fix three areas where INSERT ... ON CONFLICT failed to work properly with other SQL features.
Make INET and CIDR data types properly reject bad IPv6 values
Prevent crash in "point ## lseg" operator for NaN input
Avoid possible crash in pg_get_expr()
Fix several one-byte buffer over-reads in to_number()
Don't needlessly plan query if WITH NO DATA is specified
Avoid crash-unsafe state in expensive heap_update() paths
Fix hint bit update during WAL replay of row locking operations
Avoid unnecessary "could not serialize access" with FOR KEY SHARE
Avoid crash in postgres -C when the specified variable is a null string
Fix two issues with logical decoding and subtransactions
Ensure that backends see up-to-date statistics for shared catalogs
Prevent possible failure when vacuuming multixact IDs in an upgraded database
When a manual ANALYZE specifies columns, don't reset changes_since_analyze
Fix ANALYZE's overestimation of n_distinct for columns with nulls
Fix bug in b-tree mark/restore processing
Fix building of large (bigger than shared_buffers) hash indexes
Prevent infinite loop in GiST index build with NaN values
Fix possible crash during a nearest-neighbor indexscan
Fix "PANIC: failed to add BRIN tuple" error
Prevent possible crash during background worker shutdown
Many fixes for issues in parallel pg_dump and pg_restore
Make pg_basebackup accept -Z 0 as no compression
Make regression tests safe for Danish and Welsh locales
previous handful of packages like -datatypes or -dblink. They
contain all of the contrib subtree, matching what similar packages
carry in e.g. FreeBSD ports or what PostgreSQL users generally
expect.
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and
plug-in features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system,
mainly because they address a limited audience or are too
experimental to be part of the main source tree. This does not
preclude their usefulness.
This release closes security hole CVE-2016-2193, where a query plan might get reused for more than one ROLE in the same session. This could cause the wrong set of Row Level Security (RLS) policies to be used for the query.
The update also fixes CVE-2016-3065, a server crash bug triggered by using pageinspect with BRIN index pages. Since an attacker might be able to expose a few bytes of server memory, this crash is being treated as a security issue.
This release fixes two security issues, as well as several bugs found
over the last four months.
CVE-2016-0773 Unicode regular expression buffer overflow
CVE-2016-0766 PL/Java privilege escalation
Two security issues have been fixed in this release which affect users of specific PostgreSQL features:
CVE-2015-5289: json or jsonb input values constructed from arbitrary user input can crash the PostgreSQL server and cause a denial of service.
CVE-2015-5288: The crypt() function included with the optional pgCrypto extension could be exploited to read a few additional bytes of memory. No working exploit for this issue has been developed.
This release primarily fixes issues not successfully fixed in prior releases. It should be applied as soon as possible all users of major versions 9.3 and 9.4. Other users should apply at the next available downtime.
Crash Recovery Fixes:
Earlier update releases attempted to fix an issue in PostgreSQL 9.3 and 9.4 with "multixact wraparound", but failed to account for issues doing multixact cleanup during crash recovery. This could cause servers to be unable to restart after a crash. As such, all users of 9.3 and 9.4 should apply this update as soon as possible.
* File Permissions Fix
* Have pg_get_functiondef() show the LEAKPROOF property
* Make pushJsonbValue() function push jbvBinary type
* Allow building with threaded Python on OpenBSD
Security Fixes
* CVE-2015-0241 Buffer overruns in "to_char" functions.
* CVE-2015-0242 Buffer overrun in replacement printf family of functions.
* CVE-2015-0243 Memory errors in functions in the pgcrypto extension.
* CVE-2015-0244 An error in extended protocol message reading.
* CVE-2014-8161 Constraint violation errors can cause display of values in columns which the user would not normally have rights to see.
JSON and JSONB Unicode Escapes
Other Fixes and Improvements
* Cope with the non-ASCII Norwegian Windows locale name.
* Avoid data corruption when databases are moved to new tablespaces and back again.
* Ensure that UNLOGGED tables are correctly copied during ALTER DATABASE operations.
* Avoid deadlocks when locking recently modified rows.
* Fix two SELECT FOR UPDATE query issues.
* Prevent false negative for shortest-first regular expression matches.
* Fix false positives and negatives in tsquery contains operator.
* Fix namespace handling in xpath().
* Prevent row-producing functions from creating empty column names.
* Make autovacuum use per-table cost_limit and cost_delay settings.
* When autovacuum=off, limit autovacuum work to wraparound prevention only.
* Multiple fixes for logical decoding in 9.4.
* Fix transient errors on hot standby queries due to page replacement.
* Prevent duplicate WAL file archiving at end of recovery or standby promotion.
* Prevent deadlock in parallel restore of schema-only dump.
The data corruption issue in PostgreSQL 9.3 affects binary replication standbys, servers being recovered from point-in-time-recovery backup, and standalone servers which recover from a system crash. The bug causes unrecoverable index corruption during recovery due to incorrect replay of row locking operations. This can then cause query results to be inconsistent depending on whether or not an index is used, and eventually lead to primary key violations and similar issues. For this reason, users are encouraged to replace each of their standby databases with a new base backup after applying the update.
Other PostgreSQL 9.3-only fixes in this update include:
Make sure that statistics files for dropped databases get deleted
Allow materialized views to be referenced in UPDATE and DELETE queries
Add read-only data_checksum parameter
Prevent erroneous operator push-down in postgres_fdw
This release resolves some other issues in all versions of PostgreSQL, including:
Fix timing consistency issue with NOTIFY
Allow regular expression execution to be cancelled
Improve performance of index checks for newly added rows
Prevent premature walsender disconnection
Prevent memory errors on newer Windows versions
Update timezone files
This update fixes CVE-2014-0060, in which PostgreSQL did not properly enforce the WITH ADMIN OPTION permission for ROLE management.
This update also fixes some issues which affect binary replication and row locking, and can cause recoverable data corruption in some cases.
In addition to the above, the following issues are fixed in this release:
Fix WAL logging of visibility map change
Make sure that GIN indexes log all insertions
Get pause_at_recovery_target to pause at correct time
Ensure walreceiver sends hot-standby feedback messages on time
Prevent timeout interrupts from taking control away from mainline code
Eliminate several race conditions
Fix some broken HINTs in error messages
Prevent server lockup on SSL connection loss
Fix two Unicode handling issues
Prevent crash on certain subselect syntax
Prevent crash on select from zero column table
Fix two bugs with LATERAL
Fix issue with UNION ALL, partitioning, and updates
Ensure that ANALYZE understands domains over ranges
Eliminate permissions check when using default tablespace
Fix memory leakage in JSON functions
Allow extensions with event triggers
Distinguish numbers correctly in JSON output
Fix permissions for pg_start_backup() and pg_stop_backup()
Accept SHIFT_JIS as locale name
Fix .* expansion for SQL function variables
Prevent infinite loop on some COPY connection failures
Several fixes for client issues on Windows
Enable building PostgreSQL with Visual Studio 2013
Update time zone files for recent changes
The replication issue affects some users of PostgreSQL binary replication, and can cause minor data loss between the master and the standby. While not all users are affected, it is difficult to predict when the bug will occur, so we urge all users of replication and continuous backup (PITR) to update immediately. Additionally, users who had replication running under PostgreSQL minor versions 9.3.0, 9.3.1, 9.2.5, 9.1.10, or 9.0.14 should plan to take a fresh base backup of each standby after update, in order to ensure no prior data corruption already exists.
This release also fixes two timing issues with VACUUM, which can cause old, overwritten or deleted rows to re-appear at a later date under some circumstances. Users with very high transaction rates, particularly those who experience "transaction ID wraparound" every few weeks or less, are the most at risk for this issue. Those users should set vacuum_freeze_table_age to 0, and run a database-wide VACUUM after the update. The second of the two VACUUM issues affects only 9.3, making it expecially important for 9.3 users to update.
Guarantee transmission of all WAL files before replica failover
Prevent downcasing of non-ASCII identifiers
Fix several minor memory leaks
Correct overcommit behavior when using more than 24GB of work memory
Improve planner cost estimates for choosing generic plans
Fix estimates of NULL rows in boolean columns
Make UNION ALL and inheritance query plans recheck parameterized paths
Correct pg_dump bugs for foreign tables, views, and extensions
Prevent a parallel pg_restore failure on certain indexes
Make REINDEX revalidate constraints
Prevent two deadlock issues in SP-GIST and REINDEX CONCURRENTLY
Prevent GiST index lookup crash
Fix several regular expression failures
Allow ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES to work on all schemas
Loosen restrictions on keywords
Allow various spellings of infinity
Expand ability to compare rows to records and arrays
Prevent psql client crash on bad PSQLRC file
Add spinlock support for ARM64
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.
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.
The security issue fixed in this release, CVE-2013-0255, allows a previously authenticated user to crash the server by calling an internal function with invalid arguments. This issue was discovered by independent security researcher Sumit Soni this week and reported via Secunia SVCRP, and we are grateful for their efforts in making PostgreSQL more secure.
Today's update also fixes a performance regression which caused a decrease in throughput when using dynamic queries in stored procedures in version 9.2. Applications which use PL/pgSQL's EXECUTE are strongly affected by this regression and should be updated. Additionally, we have fixed intermittent crashes caused by CREATE/DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY, and multiple minor issues with replication.
This release is expected to be the final update for version 8.3, which is now End-of-Life (EOL). Users of version 8.3 should plan to upgrade to a later version of PostgreSQL immediately. For more information, see our Versioning Policy.
This update release also contains fixes for many minor issues discovered and patched by the PostgreSQL community in the last two months, including:
* Prevent unnecessary table scans during vacuuming
* Prevent spurious cached plan error in PL/pgSQL
* Allow sub-SELECTs to be subscripted
* Prevent DROP OWNED from dropping databases or tablespaces
* Make ECPG use translated messages
* Allow PL/Python to use multi-table trigger functions (again) in 9.1 and 9.2
* Fix several activity log management issues on Windows
* Prevent autovacuum file truncation from being cancelled by deadlock_timeout
* Make extensions build with the .exe suffix automatically on Windows
* Fix concurrency issues with CREATE/DROP DATABASE
* Reject out-of-range values in to_date() conversion function
* Revert cost estimation for large indexes back to pre-9.2 behavior
* Make pg_basebackup tolerate timeline switches
* Cleanup leftover temp table entries during crash recovery
* Prevent infinite loop when COPY inserts a large tuple into a table with a large fillfactor
* Prevent integer overflow in dynahash creation
* Make pg_upgrade work with INVALID indexes
* Fix bugs in TYPE privileges
* Allow Contrib installchecks to run in their own databases
* Many documentation updates
* Add new timezone "FET".
This update release also contains fixes for many minor issues discovered and patched by the PostgreSQL community in the last month, including several fixes which are specific to version 9.2. These include:
* Prevent psql crash due to incorrectly encoded input data
* Fix pg_regress gmake build issues
* Make sure correct directory is created for extensions
* Fix some issues with buffer locks and VACUUM
* Multiple fixes and improvements for pg_upgrade
* Fix bugs with end-of-recovery when failing over to a standby
* Avoid bogus "out-of-sequence timeline ID" errors in standby-mode
* Don't launch new child processes during shutdown
* Improve the ability of JOINs to use partial indexes
* Fix assorted integer overflow errors
* Eliminate memory leaks in record_out() and record_send()
* Skip searching for subtransaction logs at COMMIT
* Fix WaitLatch() timing issues
* Fix handling of inherited check constraints in ALTER COLUMN TYPE
* Make ALTER EXTENSION SET SCHEMA behave as documented
* Have SEQUENCE SET statements in the "data" section of sectional dumps
* Prevent parser from believing that VIEWs have system columns
* Fix --clean mode for pg_dump
* Prevent hash table corruption on out-of-memory
* Various query planner and executor fixes and improvements
* Multiple documentation updates
* DST updates for seven timezones
The update fixes two potential data corruption issues present in the PostgreSQL 9.1 and 9.2 for any server which has crashed, been shutdown with "immediate", or was failed over to a standby. First, the PostgreSQL development team has discovered a chance of corruption of BTREE and GIN indexes for databases. Second, there is a significant chance of corruption of the visibility map. This update fixes both issues.
We strongly advise users of 9.1 and 9.2 to run VACUUM and/or index rebuilds after applying the update. Please see the 2012-09-24 Update wiki page for detailed instructions.
This update release also contains fixes for many minor issues discovered and patched by the PostgreSQL community in the last month, including many fixes for the newly released version 9.2. These include:
fix sorting issue with IN lists and indexes
fix planner failure when combining GROUP BY with window functions
improve selectivity of text searches using prefixes
prevent rescanning of WITH clauses from giving wrong answers
fix PL/Perl crashing issue
reduce bloat for multi-column GiST indexes
time zone data changes for Fiji
disallow Extensions from circular schema assignment
prevent crashes when default_transaction_isolation is set to "serializable"
several minor fixes to pg_upgrade
* Prevent access to external files/URLs via XML entity references
* Prevent access to external files/URLs via contrib/xml2's xslt_process()
* Prevent too-early recycling of btree index pages
* Fix crash-safety bug with newly-created-or-reset sequences
* Fix race condition in enum-type value comparisons
* Fix txid_current() to report the correct epoch when not in hot standby
* Prevent selection of unsuitable replication connections as the synchronous
standby
* Fix bug in startup of Hot Standby when a master transaction has many
subtransactions
* Ensure the backup_label file is fsync'd after pg_start_backup()
* Fix timeout handling in walsender processes
* Wake walsenders after each background flush by walwriter
* Fix LISTEN/NOTIFY to cope better with I/O problems, such as out of disk space
* Only allow autovacuum to be auto-canceled by a directly blocked process
* Improve logging of autovacuum cancels
* Fix WITH attached to a nested set operation (UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT)
Changes:
* Fix incorrect password transformation in contrib/pgcrypto's DES crypt()
function (Solar Designer)
* Ignore SECURITY DEFINER and SET attributes for a procedural language's call
handler (Tom Lane)
* Make contrib/citext's upgrade script fix collations of citext arrays and
domains over citext (Tom Lane)
* Allow numeric timezone offsets in timestamp input to be up to 16 hours away
from UTC (Tom Lane)
* Fix timestamp conversion to cope when the given time is exactly the last DST
transition time for the current timezone (Tom Lane)
* Fix text to name and char to name casts to perform string truncation
correctly in multibyte encodings (Karl Schnaitter)
* Fix memory copying bug in to_tsquery() (Heikki Linnakangas)
* Ensure txid_current() reports the correct epoch when executed in hot standby
(Simon Riggs)
* Fix planner's handling of outer PlaceHolderVars within subqueries (Tom Lane)
* Fix planning of UNION ALL subqueries with output columns that are not simple
variables (Tom Lane)
* Fix slow session startup when pg_attribute is very large (Tom Lane)
* Ensure sequential scans check for query cancel reasonably often (Merlin
Moncure)
* Ensure the Windows implementation of PGSemaphoreLock() clears
ImmediateInterruptOK before returning (Tom Lane)
* Show whole-row variables safely when printing views or rules (Abbas Butt, Tom
Lane)
* Fix COPY FROM to properly handle null marker strings that correspond to
invalid encoding (Tom Lane)
* Fix EXPLAIN VERBOSE for writable CTEs containing RETURNING clauses (Tom Lane)
* Fix PREPARE TRANSACTION to work correctly in the presence of advisory locks
(Tom Lane)
* Fix truncation of unlogged tables (Robert Haas)
* Ignore missing schemas during non-interactive assignments of search_path (Tom
Lane)
* Fix bugs with temporary or transient tables used in extension scripts (Tom
Lane)
* Ensure autovacuum worker processes perform stack depth checking properly
(Heikki Linnakangas)
* Fix logging collector to not lose log coherency under high load (Andrew
Dunstan)
* Fix logging collector to ensure it will restart file rotation after receiving
SIGHUP (Tom Lane)
* Fix "too many LWLocks taken" failure in GiST indexes (Heikki Linnakangas)
* Fix WAL replay logic for GIN indexes to not fail if the index was
subsequently dropped (Tom Lane)
* Correctly detect SSI conflicts of prepared transactions after a crash (Dan
Ports)
* Avoid synchronous replication delay when committing a transaction that only
modified temporary tables (Heikki Linnakangas)
* Fix error handling in pg_basebackup (Thomas Ogrisegg, Fujii Masao)
* Fix walsender to not go into a busy loop if connection is terminated (Fujii
Masao)
* Fix memory leak in PL/pgSQL's RETURN NEXT command (Joe Conway)
* Fix PL/pgSQL's GET DIAGNOSTICS command when the target is the function's
first variable (Tom Lane)
* Ensure that PL/Perl package-qualifies the _TD variable (Alex Hunsaker)
* Fix PL/Python functions returning composite types to accept a string for
their result value (Jan Urbanski)
* Fix potential access off the end of memory in psql's expanded display (\x)
mode (Peter Eisentraut)
* Fix several performance problems in pg_dump when the database contains many
objects (Jeff Janes, Tom Lane)
* Fix memory and file descriptor leaks in pg_restore when reading a
directory-format archive (Peter Eisentraut)
* Fix pg_upgrade for the case that a database stored in a non-default
tablespace contains a table in the cluster's default tablespace (Bruce Momjian)
* In ecpg, fix rare memory leaks and possible overwrite of one byte after the
sqlca_t structure (Peter Eisentraut)
* Fix contrib/dblink's dblink_exec() to not leak temporary database connections
upon error (Tom Lane)
* Fix contrib/dblink to report the correct connection name in error messages
(Kyotaro Horiguchi)
* Fix contrib/vacuumlo to use multiple transactions when dropping many large
objects (Tim Lewis, Robert Haas, Tom Lane)
* Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2012c for DST law changes in
Antarctica, Armenia, Chile, Cuba, Falkland Islands, Gaza, Haiti, Hebron,
Morocco, Syria, and Tokelau Islands;
* Fix btree index corruption from insertions concurrent with vacuuming
* Recover from errors occurring during WAL replay of DROP TABLESPACE
* Fix transient zeroing of shared buffers during WAL replay
* Fix postmaster to attempt restart after a hot-standby crash
* Fix corner case in SSI transaction cleanup
* Update per-column permissions, not only per-table permissions, when changing
table owner
* Fix handling of data-modifying WITH subplans in READ COMMITTED rechecking
* Fix for "could not find plan for CTE" failures
* Fix unsupported node type error caused by COLLATE in an INSERT expression
* Avoid crashing when we have problems deleting table files post-commit
* Fix recently-introduced memory leak in processing of inet/cidr
* Fix GIN cost estimation to handle column IN (...) index conditions
* Fix I/O-conversion-related memory leaks in plpgsql
* Teach pg_upgrade to handle renaming of plpython's shared library (affecting
upgrades to 9.1)
* Fix bugs in information_schema.referential_constraints view
* Correct collations for citext columns and indexes
* Prevent possible crash when joining to a scalar function
* Prevent transitory data corruption of GIN indexes after a crash
* Prevent data corruption on TOAST columns when copying data
* Fix failures during hot standby startup
* Correct another "variable not found in subplan target list" bug
* Fix bug with sorting on aggregate expressions in windowing functions
* Multiple bug fixes for pg_upgrade
* Change Foreign Key creation order to better support self-referential keys
* Multiple bug fixes to CREATE EXTENSION
* Ensure that function return type and data returned from PL/perl agree
* Ensure that PL/perl strings are always UTF-8
* Assorted bug fixes for various Extensions
* Updates to the time zone database, particularly to CST6
* Make pg_options_to_table return NULL for an option with no value
* Fix memory leak at end of a GiST index scan
* Fix explicit reference to pg_temp schema in "CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE"
years, removing roadblocks to deploying new or ported applications on
PostgreSQL. These include:
* Synchronous Replication: enable high-availability with consistency across
multiple servers
* Per-Column Collations: support linguistically-correct sorting per database,
table or column.
* Unlogged Tables: greatly improves performance for ephemeral data
Our community of contributors innovates with cutting-edge features. Version 9.1
includes several which are new to the database industry, such as:
* K-Nearest-Neighbor Indexing: index on "distance" for faster location and text
search queries
* Serializable Snapshot Isolation: keeps concurrent transactions consistent
without blocking, using "true serializability"
* Writeable Common Table Expressions: execute complex multi-stage data updates
in a single query
* Security-Enhanced Postgres: deploy military-grade security and Mandatory
Access Control
