postgresql-8.3 8.3.20-0ubuntu8.04 source package in Ubuntu

Changelog

postgresql-8.3 (8.3.20-0ubuntu8.04) hardy-security; urgency=low

  * New upstream bug fix/security release:
   - Prevent access to external files/URLs via XML entity references
     (Noah Misch, Tom Lane)
     xml_parse() would attempt to fetch external files or URLs as needed
     to resolve DTD and entity references in an XML value, thus allowing
     unprivileged database users to attempt to fetch data with the
     privileges of the database server. While the external data wouldn't
     get returned directly to the user, portions of it could be exposed
     in error messages if the data didn't parse as valid XML; and in any
     case the mere ability to check existence of a file might be useful
     to an attacker. (CVE-2012-3489)
   - Prevent access to external files/URLs via "contrib/xml2"'s
     xslt_process() (Peter Eisentraut)
     libxslt offers the ability to read and write both files and URLs
     through stylesheet commands, thus allowing unprivileged database
     users to both read and write data with the privileges of the
     database server. Disable that through proper use of libxslt's
     security options. (CVE-2012-3488)
     Also, remove xslt_process()'s ability to fetch documents and
     stylesheets from external files/URLs. While this was a documented
     "feature", it was long regarded as a bad idea. The fix for
     CVE-2012-3489 broke that capability, and rather than expend effort
     on trying to fix it, we're just going to summarily remove it.
   - Prevent too-early recycling of btree index pages (Noah Misch)
     When we allowed read-only transactions to skip assigning XIDs, we
     introduced the possibility that a deleted btree page could be
     recycled while a read-only transaction was still in flight to it.
     This would result in incorrect index search results. The
     probability of such an error occurring in the field seems very low
     because of the timing requirements, but nonetheless it should be
     fixed.
   - Fix crash-safety bug with newly-created-or-reset sequences (Tom
     Lane)
     If "ALTER SEQUENCE" was executed on a freshly created or reset
     sequence, and then precisely one nextval() call was made on it, and
     then the server crashed, WAL replay would restore the sequence to a
     state in which it appeared that no nextval() had been done, thus
     allowing the first sequence value to be returned again by the next
     nextval() call. In particular this could manifest for serial
     columns, since creation of a serial column's sequence includes an
     "ALTER SEQUENCE OWNED BY" step.
   - Ensure the "backup_label" file is fsync'd after pg_start_backup()
     (Dave Kerr)
   - Back-patch 9.1 improvement to compress the fsync request queue
     (Robert Haas)
     This improves performance during checkpoints. The 9.1 change has
     now seen enough field testing to seem safe to back-patch.
   - Only allow autovacuum to be auto-canceled by a directly blocked
     process (Tom Lane)
     The original coding could allow inconsistent behavior in some
     cases; in particular, an autovacuum could get canceled after less
     than deadlock_timeout grace period.
   - Improve logging of autovacuum cancels (Robert Haas)
   - Fix log collector so that log_truncate_on_rotation works during the
     very first log rotation after server start (Tom Lane)
   - Ensure that a whole-row reference to a subquery doesn't include any
     extra GROUP BY or ORDER BY columns (Tom Lane)
   - Disallow copying whole-row references in CHECK constraints and
     index definitions during "CREATE TABLE" (Tom Lane)
     This situation can arise in "CREATE TABLE" with LIKE or INHERITS.
     The copied whole-row variable was incorrectly labeled with the row
     type of the original table not the new one. Rejecting the case
     seems reasonable for LIKE, since the row types might well diverge
     later. For INHERITS we should ideally allow it, with an implicit
     coercion to the parent table's row type; but that will require more
     work than seems safe to back-patch.
   - Fix memory leak in ARRAY(SELECT ...) subqueries (Heikki
     Linnakangas, Tom Lane)
   - Fix extraction of common prefixes from regular expressions (Tom
     Lane)
     The code could get confused by quantified parenthesized
     subexpressions, such as ^(foo)?bar. This would lead to incorrect
     index optimization of searches for such patterns.
   - Report errors properly in "contrib/xml2"'s xslt_process() (Tom
     Lane)
   - Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2012e for DST law
     changes in Morocco and Tokelau
 -- Jamie Strandboge <email address hidden>   Thu, 16 Aug 2012 17:23:29 -0500