USN-118-1: PostgreSQL vulnerabilities

Releases

• Ubuntu 5.04
• Ubuntu 4.10

Details

It was discovered that unprivileged users were allowed to call
internal character conversion functions. However, since these
functions were not designed to be safe against malicious choices of
argument values, this could potentially be exploited to execute
arbitrary code with the privileges of the PostgreSQL server (user
"postgres"). (CAN-2005-1409)

Another vulnerability was found in the "tsearch2" module of
postgresql-contrib. This module declared several functions as
internal, although they did not accept any internal argument; this
breaks the type safety of "internal" by allowing users to construct
SQL commands that invoke other functions accepting "internal"
arguments. This could eventually be exploited to crash the server, or
possibly even execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the
PostgreSQL server. (CAN-2005-1410)

These vulnerabilities must also be fixed in all existing databases
when upgrading. The post-installation script of the updated package
attempts to do this automatically; if the package installs without any
error, all existing databases have been updated to be safe against
above vulnerabilities. Should the installation fail, please contact
the Ubuntu security team (security@ubuntu.com) immediately.

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 5.04

• postgresql -
• postgresql-contrib -

Ubuntu 4.10

• postgresql -
• postgresql-contrib -

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References

• CVE-2005-1409
• CVE-2005-1410