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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"><html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /><title>E.161. Release 8.4.20</title><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="stylesheet.css" /><link rev="made" href="pgsql-docs@postgresql.org" /><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.79.1" /><link rel="prev" href="release-8-4-21.html" title="E.160. Release 8.4.21" /><link rel="next" href="release-8-4-19.html" title="E.162. Release 8.4.19" /></head><body><div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/transitional" class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="5" align="center">E.161. Release 8.4.20</th></tr><tr><td width="10%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="release-8-4-21.html" title="E.160. Release 8.4.21">Prev</a> </td><td width="10%" align="left"><a accesskey="u" href="release.html" title="Appendix E. Release Notes">Up</a></td><th width="60%" align="center">Appendix E. Release Notes</th><td width="10%" align="right"><a accesskey="h" href="index.html" title="PostgreSQL 11.1 Documentation">Home</a></td><td width="10%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="release-8-4-19.html" title="E.162. Release 8.4.19">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr></hr></div><div class="sect1" id="RELEASE-8-4-20"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both">E.161. Release 8.4.20</h2></div></div></div><div class="toc"><dl class="toc"><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="release-8-4-20.html#id-1.11.6.165.5">E.161.1. Migration to Version 8.4.20</a></span></dt><dt><span class="sect2"><a href="release-8-4-20.html#id-1.11.6.165.6">E.161.2. Changes</a></span></dt></dl></div><p><strong>Release date: </strong>2014-02-20</p><p>
   This release contains a variety of fixes from 8.4.19.
   For information about new features in the 8.4 major release, see
   <a class="xref" href="release-8-4.html" title="E.181. Release 8.4">Section E.181</a>.
  </p><p>
   The <span class="productname">PostgreSQL</span> community will stop releasing updates
   for the 8.4.X release series in July 2014.
   Users are encouraged to update to a newer release branch soon.
  </p><div class="sect2" id="id-1.11.6.165.5"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title">E.161.1. Migration to Version 8.4.20</h3></div></div></div><p>
    A dump/restore is not required for those running 8.4.X.
   </p><p>
    However, if you are upgrading from a version earlier than 8.4.19,
    see <a class="xref" href="release-8-4-19.html" title="E.162. Release 8.4.19">Section E.162</a>.
   </p></div><div class="sect2" id="id-1.11.6.165.6"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h3 class="title">E.161.2. Changes</h3></div></div></div><div class="itemizedlist"><ul class="itemizedlist" style="list-style-type: disc; "><li class="listitem"><p>
      Shore up <code class="literal">GRANT ... WITH ADMIN OPTION</code> restrictions
      (Noah Misch)
     </p><p>
      Granting a role without <code class="literal">ADMIN OPTION</code> is supposed to
      prevent the grantee from adding or removing members from the granted
      role, but this restriction was easily bypassed by doing <code class="literal">SET
      ROLE</code> first.  The security impact is mostly that a role member can
      revoke the access of others, contrary to the wishes of his grantor.
      Unapproved role member additions are a lesser concern, since an
      uncooperative role member could provide most of his rights to others
      anyway by creating views or <code class="literal">SECURITY DEFINER</code> functions.
      (CVE-2014-0060)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Prevent privilege escalation via manual calls to PL validator
      functions (Andres Freund)
     </p><p>
      The primary role of PL validator functions is to be called implicitly
      during <code class="command">CREATE FUNCTION</code>, but they are also normal SQL
      functions that a user can call explicitly.  Calling a validator on
      a function actually written in some other language was not checked
      for and could be exploited for privilege-escalation purposes.
      The fix involves adding a call to a privilege-checking function in
      each validator function.  Non-core procedural languages will also
      need to make this change to their own validator functions, if any.
      (CVE-2014-0061)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Avoid multiple name lookups during table and index DDL
      (Robert Haas, Andres Freund)
     </p><p>
      If the name lookups come to different conclusions due to concurrent
      activity, we might perform some parts of the DDL on a different table
      than other parts.  At least in the case of <code class="command">CREATE INDEX</code>,
      this can be used to cause the permissions checks to be performed
      against a different table than the index creation, allowing for a
      privilege escalation attack.
      (CVE-2014-0062)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Prevent buffer overrun with long datetime strings (Noah Misch)
     </p><p>
      The <code class="literal">MAXDATELEN</code> constant was too small for the longest
      possible value of type <code class="type">interval</code>, allowing a buffer overrun
      in <code class="function">interval_out()</code>.  Although the datetime input
      functions were more careful about avoiding buffer overrun, the limit
      was short enough to cause them to reject some valid inputs, such as
      input containing a very long timezone name.  The <span class="application">ecpg</span>
      library contained these vulnerabilities along with some of its own.
      (CVE-2014-0063)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Prevent buffer overrun due to integer overflow in size calculations
      (Noah Misch, Heikki Linnakangas)
     </p><p>
      Several functions, mostly type input functions, calculated an
      allocation size without checking for overflow.  If overflow did
      occur, a too-small buffer would be allocated and then written past.
      (CVE-2014-0064)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Prevent overruns of fixed-size buffers
      (Peter Eisentraut, Jozef Mlich)
     </p><p>
      Use <code class="function">strlcpy()</code> and related functions to provide a clear
      guarantee that fixed-size buffers are not overrun.  Unlike the
      preceding items, it is unclear whether these cases really represent
      live issues, since in most cases there appear to be previous
      constraints on the size of the input string.  Nonetheless it seems
      prudent to silence all Coverity warnings of this type.
      (CVE-2014-0065)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Avoid crashing if <code class="function">crypt()</code> returns NULL (Honza Horak,
      Bruce Momjian)
     </p><p>
      There are relatively few scenarios in which <code class="function">crypt()</code>
      could return NULL, but <code class="filename">contrib/chkpass</code> would crash
      if it did.  One practical case in which this could be an issue is
      if <span class="application">libc</span> is configured to refuse to execute unapproved
      hashing algorithms (e.g., <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">FIPS mode</span>”</span>).
      (CVE-2014-0066)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Document risks of <code class="literal">make check</code> in the regression testing
      instructions (Noah Misch, Tom Lane)
     </p><p>
      Since the temporary server started by <code class="literal">make check</code>
      uses <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">trust</span>”</span> authentication, another user on the same machine
      could connect to it as database superuser, and then potentially
      exploit the privileges of the operating-system user who started the
      tests.  A future release will probably incorporate changes in the
      testing procedure to prevent this risk, but some public discussion is
      needed first.  So for the moment, just warn people against using
      <code class="literal">make check</code> when there are untrusted users on the
      same machine.
      (CVE-2014-0067)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Fix possible mis-replay of WAL records when some segments of a
      relation aren't full size (Greg Stark, Tom Lane)
     </p><p>
      The WAL update could be applied to the wrong page, potentially many
      pages past where it should have been.  Aside from corrupting data,
      this error has been observed to result in significant <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">bloat</span>”</span>
      of standby servers compared to their masters, due to updates being
      applied far beyond where the end-of-file should have been.  This
      failure mode does not appear to be a significant risk during crash
      recovery, only when initially synchronizing a standby created from a
      base backup taken from a quickly-changing master.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Ensure that insertions into non-leaf GIN index pages write a full-page
      WAL record when appropriate (Heikki Linnakangas)
     </p><p>
      The previous coding risked index corruption in the event of a
      partial-page write during a system crash.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Fix race conditions during server process exit (Robert Haas)
     </p><p>
      Ensure that signal handlers don't attempt to use the
      process's <code class="varname">MyProc</code> pointer after it's no longer valid.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Fix unsafe references to <code class="varname">errno</code> within error reporting
      logic (Christian Kruse)
     </p><p>
      This would typically lead to odd behaviors such as missing or
      inappropriate <code class="literal">HINT</code> fields.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Fix possible crashes from using <code class="function">ereport()</code> too early
      during server startup (Tom Lane)
     </p><p>
      The principal case we've seen in the field is a crash if the server
      is started in a directory it doesn't have permission to read.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Clear retry flags properly in OpenSSL socket write
      function (Alexander Kukushkin)
     </p><p>
      This omission could result in a server lockup after unexpected loss
      of an SSL-encrypted connection.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Fix length checking for Unicode identifiers (<code class="literal">U&amp;"..."</code>
      syntax) containing escapes (Tom Lane)
     </p><p>
      A spurious truncation warning would be printed for such identifiers
      if the escaped form of the identifier was too long, but the
      identifier actually didn't need truncation after de-escaping.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Fix possible crash due to invalid plan for nested sub-selects, such
      as <code class="literal">WHERE (... x IN (SELECT ...) ...) IN (SELECT ...)</code>
      (Tom Lane)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Ensure that <code class="command">ANALYZE</code> creates statistics for a table column
      even when all the values in it are <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">too wide</span>”</span> (Tom Lane)
     </p><p>
      <code class="command">ANALYZE</code> intentionally omits very wide values from its
      histogram and most-common-values calculations, but it neglected to do
      something sane in the case that all the sampled entries are too wide.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      In <code class="literal">ALTER TABLE ... SET TABLESPACE</code>, allow the database's
      default tablespace to be used without a permissions check
      (Stephen Frost)
     </p><p>
      <code class="literal">CREATE TABLE</code> has always allowed such usage,
      but <code class="literal">ALTER TABLE</code> didn't get the memo.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Fix <span class="quote">“<span class="quote">cannot accept a set</span>”</span> error when some arms of
      a <code class="literal">CASE</code> return a set and others don't (Tom Lane)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Fix checks for all-zero client addresses in pgstat functions (Kevin
      Grittner)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Fix possible misclassification of multibyte characters by the text
      search parser (Tom Lane)
     </p><p>
      Non-ASCII characters could be misclassified when using C locale with
      a multibyte encoding.  On Cygwin, non-C locales could fail as well.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Fix possible misbehavior in <code class="function">plainto_tsquery()</code>
      (Heikki Linnakangas)
     </p><p>
      Use <code class="function">memmove()</code> not <code class="function">memcpy()</code> for copying
      overlapping memory regions.  There have been no field reports of
      this actually causing trouble, but it's certainly risky.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Accept <code class="literal">SHIFT_JIS</code> as an encoding name for locale checking
      purposes (Tatsuo Ishii)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Fix misbehavior of <code class="function">PQhost()</code> on Windows (Fujii Masao)
     </p><p>
      It should return <code class="literal">localhost</code> if no host has been specified.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Improve error handling in <span class="application">libpq</span> and <span class="application">psql</span>
      for failures during <code class="literal">COPY TO STDOUT/FROM STDIN</code> (Tom Lane)
     </p><p>
      In particular this fixes an infinite loop that could occur in 9.2 and
      up if the server connection was lost during <code class="literal">COPY FROM
      STDIN</code>.  Variants of that scenario might be possible in older
      versions, or with other client applications.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Fix misaligned descriptors in <span class="application">ecpg</span> (MauMau)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      In <span class="application">ecpg</span>, handle lack of a hostname in the connection
      parameters properly (Michael Meskes)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Fix performance regression in <code class="filename">contrib/dblink</code> connection
      startup (Joe Conway)
     </p><p>
      Avoid an unnecessary round trip when client and server encodings match.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      In <code class="filename">contrib/isn</code>, fix incorrect calculation of the check
      digit for ISMN values (Fabien Coelho)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Ensure client-code-only installation procedure works as documented
      (Peter Eisentraut)
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      In Mingw and Cygwin builds, install the <span class="application">libpq</span> DLL
      in the <code class="filename">bin</code> directory (Andrew Dunstan)
     </p><p>
      This duplicates what the MSVC build has long done.  It should fix
      problems with programs like <span class="application">psql</span> failing to start
      because they can't find the DLL.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Don't generate plain-text <code class="filename">HISTORY</code>
      and <code class="filename">src/test/regress/README</code> files anymore (Tom Lane)
     </p><p>
      These text files duplicated the main HTML and PDF documentation
      formats.  The trouble involved in maintaining them greatly outweighs
      the likely audience for plain-text format.  Distribution tarballs
      will still contain files by these names, but they'll just be stubs
      directing the reader to consult the main documentation.
      The plain-text <code class="filename">INSTALL</code> file will still be maintained, as
      there is arguably a use-case for that.
     </p></li><li class="listitem"><p>
      Update time zone data files to <span class="application">tzdata</span> release 2013i
      for DST law changes in Jordan and historical changes in Cuba.
     </p><p>
      In addition, the zones <code class="literal">Asia/Riyadh87</code>,
      <code class="literal">Asia/Riyadh88</code>, and <code class="literal">Asia/Riyadh89</code> have been
      removed, as they are no longer maintained by IANA, and never
      represented actual civil timekeeping practice.
     </p></li></ul></div></div></div><div class="navfooter"><hr /><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="release-8-4-21.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="release.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="release-8-4-19.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">E.160. Release 8.4.21 </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> E.162. Release 8.4.19</td></tr></table></div></body></html>