September 26, 2024: PostgreSQL 17 Released!

PostgreSQL 12.4, 11.9, 10.14, 9.6.19, 9.5.23, and 13 Beta 3 Released!

Posted on 2020-08-13 by PostgreSQL Global Development Group
PostgreSQL Project Security

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released an update to all supported versions of our database system, including 12.4, 11.9, 10.14, 9.6.19, and 9.5.23, as well as the 3rd Beta release of PostgreSQL 13. This release closes two security vulnerabilities and fixes over 50 bugs reported over the last three months.

Please plan to update at your earliest convenience.

Security Issues

  • CVE-2020-14349: Uncontrolled search path element in logical replication.

Versions Affected: 10 - 12.

The PostgreSQL search_path setting determines schemas searched for tables, functions, operators, etc. The CVE-2018-1058 fix caused most PostgreSQL-provided client applications to sanitize search_path, but logical replication continued to leave search_path unchanged. Users of a replication publisher or subscriber database can create objects in the public schema and harness them to execute arbitrary SQL functions under the identity running replication, often a superuser. Installations having adopted a documented secure schema usage pattern are not vulnerable.

The PostgreSQL project thanks Noah Misch for reporting this problem.

  • CVE-2020-14350: Uncontrolled search path element in CREATE EXTENSION.

Versions Affected: 9.5 - 12. The security team typically does not test unsupported versions, but this problem is quite old.

When a superuser runs certain CREATE EXTENSION statements, users may be able to execute arbitrary SQL functions under the identity of that superuser. The attacker must have permission to create objects in the new extension's schema or a schema of a prerequisite extension. Not all extensions are vulnerable.

In addition to correcting the extensions provided with PostgreSQL, the PostgreSQL Global Development Group is issuing guidance for third-party extension authors to secure their own work.

The PostgreSQL project thanks Andres Freund for reporting this problem.

A Note on the PostgreSQL 13 Beta

This release marks the third beta release of PostgreSQL 13 and puts the community one step closer to general availability this fall.

In the spirit of the open source PostgreSQL community, we strongly encourage you to test the new features of PostgreSQL 13 in your database systems to help us eliminate any bugs or other issues that may exist. While we do not advise you to run PostgreSQL 13 Beta 3 in your production environments, we encourage you to find ways to run your typical application workloads against this beta release.

Your testing and feedback will help the community ensure that the PostgreSQL 13 release upholds our standards of providing a stable, reliable release of the world's most advanced open source relational database.

PostgreSQL 9.5 EOL Notice

PostgreSQL 9.5 will stop receiving fixes on February 11, 2021. If you are running PostgreSQL 9.5 in a production environment, we suggest that you make plans to upgrade to a newer, supported version of PostgreSQL. Please see our versioning policy for more information.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

This update also fixes over 50 bugs that were reported in the last several months. Some of these issues affect only version 12, but many affect all supported versions.

Some of these fixes include:

  • Fix edge cases in partition pruning involving multiple partition key columns with multiple or no constraining WHERE clauses.
  • Several fixes for query planning and execution involving partitions.
  • Fix for determining when to execute a column-specific UPDATE trigger on a logical replication subscriber.
  • pg_replication_slot_advance() now updates the oldest xmin and LSN values, as the failure to do this could prevent resources (e.g. WAL files) from being cleaned up.
  • Fix a performance regression in ts_headline().
  • Ensure that pg_read_file() and related functions read until EOF is reached, which fixes compatibility with pipes and other virtual files.
  • Forbid numeric NaN values in jsonpath computations, which do not exist in SQL nor JSON.
  • Several fixes for NaN inputs with aggregate functions. This fixes a change in PostgreSQL 12 where NaN values caused the following aggregates to emit values of 0 instead of NaN: corr(), covar_pop(), regr_intercept(), regr_r2(), regr_slope(), regr_sxx(), regr_sxy(), regr_syy(), stddev_pop(), and var_pop().
  • time and timetz values fractionally greater than 24:00:00 are now rejected.
  • Several fixes for EXPLAIN, including a fix for reporting resource usage when a plan uses parallel workers with "Gather Merge" nodes.
  • Fix timing of constraint revalidation in ALTER TABLE that could lead to odd errors.
  • Fix for REINDEX CONCURRENTLY that could prevent old values from being included in future logical decoding output.
  • Fix for LATERAL references that could potentially cause crashes during query execution.
  • Use the collation specified for a query when estimating operator costs
  • Fix conflict-checking anomalies in SERIALIZABLE transaction isolation mode.
  • Ensure checkpointer process discards file sync requests when fsync is off
  • Fix issue where pg_control could be written out with an inconsistent checksum, which could lead to the inability to restart the database if it crashed before the next pg_control update.
  • Ensure that libpq continues to try to read from the database connection socket after a write failure, as this allows the connection to collect any final error messages from the server.
  • Report out-of-disk-space errors properly in pg_dump and pg_basebackup
  • Several fixes for pg_restore, including a fix for parallel restore on tables that have both table-level and column-level privileges.
  • Fix for pg_upgrade to ensure it runs with vacuum_defer_cleanup_age set to 0.
  • Fix how pg_rewind handles just-deleted files in the source data directory
  • Fix failure to initialize local state correctly in contrib/dblink, which could lead to dblink_close() issuing an unexpected COMMIT on the remote server.
  • Change contrib/amcheck to not report about deleted index pages that are empty, as this is normal during WAL replay.

For the full list of changes available, please review the release notes.

Updating

All PostgreSQL update releases are cumulative. As with other minor releases, users are not required to dump and reload their database or use pg_upgrade in order to apply this update release; you may simply shutdown PostgreSQL and update its binaries.

Users who have skipped one or more update releases may need to run additional, post-update steps; please see the release notes for earlier versions for details.

For more details, please see the release notes.

NOTE: PostgreSQL 9.5 will stop receiving fixes on February 11, 2021. Please see our versioning policy for more information.

PostgreSQL 13 Beta 3 Notes

PostgreSQL 13 Beta 3 introduces a new configuration parameter, hash_mem_multiplier, which allows users to tune how much memory should be allotted for a hash aggregation. This gives users more control over whether hash aggregates will use disk storage or remain in memory, the latter being the only option prior to PostgreSQL 13.

PostgreSQL 13 Beta 3 also removes the hashagg_avoid_disk_plan configuration parameter, which was also previously known as enable_hashagg_disk.

For a list of changes that are included in PostgreSQL 13 Beta 3, please review the open items page:

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PostgreSQL_13_Open_Items#resolved_before_13beta3

To upgrade to PostgreSQL 13 Beta 3 from Beta 2, Beta 1, or an earlier version of PostgreSQL, you will need to use a strategy similar to upgrading between major versions of PostgreSQL (e.g. pg_upgrade or pg_dump / pg_restore). For more information, please visit the documentation section on upgrading.

Testing for Bugs & Compatibility

The stability of each PostgreSQL release greatly depends on you, the community, to test the upcoming version with your workloads and testing tools in order to find bugs and regressions before the general availability of PostgreSQL 13. As this is a Beta, minor changes to database behaviors, feature details, and APIs are still possible. Your feedback and testing will help determine the final tweaks on the new features, so please test in the near future. The quality of user testing helps determine when we can make a final release.

A list of open issues is publicly available in the PostgreSQL wiki. You can report bugs using this form on the PostgreSQL website:

https://www.postgresql.org/account/submitbug/

Beta Schedule

This is the third beta release of version 13. The PostgreSQL Project will release additional betas as required for testing, followed by one or more release candidates, until the final release in late 2020. For further information please see the Beta Testing page.

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