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From: Alvaro Herrera <[email protected]>
To: Tom Lane <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Should creating a new base type require superuser status?
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:07:53 -0400
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>

Tom Lane wrote:

> If you're not clear on why CREATE TYPE in the hands of a bad guy is
> dangerous, here are a couple of reasons:
> 
> * By specifying type representation details (len/byval/align) that are
> different from what the type's functions expect, you could trivially
> crash the backend, and less trivially use a pass-by-reference I/O
> function to read out the contents of backend memory.

I think being able to return cstring from a user defined function is
quite dangerous already.  I doubt we would ever give that capability to
non-superusers.

I do agree that creating base types should require a superuser though.
It too seems dangerous just on principle, even if today there's no
actual hole (that we already know of).

-- 
Alvaro Herrera                                http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.

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