Subject: CRITICAL RELEASE: Minor Releases to Fix DoS Vulnerability

From: "Marc G. Fournier" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2006 02:33:40 -0400 (AST)

PostgreSQL patch versions 8.1.2, 8.0.6, 7.4.11 and 7.3.13 are available 
today.  The fixes in the 8.1 and 8.0 branches are critical, especially for 
Windows users, and users of these branches are urged to update at their 
earliest opportunity.

One critical fix repairs a denial-of-service vulnerability: on Windows 
only, the postmaster will exit if too many connection requests arrive 
simultaneously.  This does not affect existing database connections, but 
will prevent new connections from being established until the postmaster 
is manually restarted.  The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) 
project has assigned the name CVE-2006-0105 to this issue.

Another critical fix repairs an error in ReadBuffer that can cause data 
loss due to overwriting recently-added pages.  This applies to the 8.1 and 
8.0 branches on all platforms.

Other fixes included are:
-- Character string locale comparison bug. This may require a REINDEX
    on text column indexes in some locales, such as Hungarian.
-- Prevent accidental changes of locale by plperl
-- Two fixes for Japanese encodings
-- Two fixes for COPY CSV
-- Fixes for functions returning RECORD
-- Fixes to autovacuum, dblink and pgcrypto

Further details appear in the release notes in the documentation for the 
new versions, which is distributed with the source, and will be available 
within a few days on PostgreSQL.org.

Versions 7.4.11 and 7.3.13 contain a subset of the fixes above appropriate 
to those versions.

Currently, source packages are available for all these versions, and 
Windows installer packages are available for 8.1.2 and 8.0.6. Binary 
packages for other platforms will soon be available from the PostgreSQL 
Downloads[1] page and other sources.

Marc G. Fournier
PostgreSQL Core Member

[1] - http://www.postgresql.org/download

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From: Simon Riggs <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2006 09:29:12 +0000

On Mon, 2006-01-09 at 02:33 -0400, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
> is manually restarted.  

> The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) 

No they haven't: there is no such CVE number assigned, nor is there one
pending - I just checked. (The numbers don't go that high yet).

[I was looking to update the Security page, but can't find the
appropriate refs.]

Best Regards, Simon Riggs

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From: Markus Bertheau <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2006 15:30:08 +0600

>     on text column indexes in some locales, such as Hungarian.

Can we be more specific here? How is an administrator supposed to know,
whether he needs to reindex his text column indexes or not?

Markus Bertheau

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From: Jaime Casanova <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2006 10:51:48 -0500

> whether he needs to reindex his text column indexes or not?

that's difficult to know because it depends on the locale behaviour, IIRC...

Maybe if you are using a locale different than C and have indexes on
strings then is better to REINDEX just to be sure...

--
regards,
Jaime Casanova
(DBA: DataBase Aniquilator ;)

---

From: Bruce Momjian <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2006 18:46:03 -0500 (EST)

Jaime Casanova wrote:
> > ? ???, 09/01/2006 ? 02:33 -0400, Marc G. Fournier ?????:
> >

Read the specific REINDEX mentioned in the release notes and if any
apply to you, you should reindex. Were they not clear?

-- 
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