November 14, 2024: PostgreSQL 17.1, 16.5, 15.9, 14.14, 13.17, and 12.21 Released!

PostgreSQL 12.2, 11.7, 10.12, 9.6.17, 9.5.21, and 9.4.26 Released!

Posted on 2020-02-13 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 12.2, 11.7, 10.12, 9.6.17, 9.5.21, and 9.4.26. This release fixes one security issue found in the PostgreSQL server and over 75 bugs reported over the last three months.

Users should plan to update as soon as possible.

PostgreSQL 9.4 Now EOL

This is the last release for PostgreSQL 9.4, which will no longer receive security updates and bug fixes. PostgreSQL 9.4 introduced new features such as JSONB support, the ALTER SYSTEM command, the ability to stream logical changes to an output plugin, and more.

While we are very proud of this release, these features are also found in newer versions of PostgreSQL. Many of these features have also received improvements, and, per our versioning policy, it is time to retire PostgreSQL 9.4.

To receive continued support, we suggest that you make plans to upgrade to a newer, supported version of PostgreSQL. Please see the PostgreSQL versioning policy for more information.

Security Issues

  • CVE-2020-1720: ALTER ... DEPENDS ON EXTENSION is missing authorization checks.

Versions Affected: 9.6 - 12

The ALTER ... DEPENDS ON EXTENSION sub-commands do not perform authorization checks, which can allow an unprivileged user to drop any function, procedure, materialized view, index, or trigger under certain conditions. This attack is possible if an administrator has installed an extension and an unprivileged user can CREATE, or an extension owner either executes DROP EXTENSION predictably or can be convinced to execute DROP EXTENSION.

The PostgreSQL project thanks Tom Lane for reporting this problem.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

This update also fixes over 75 bugs that were reported in the last several months. Some of these issues affect only version 12, but may also affect all supported versions.

Some of these fixes include:

  • Fix for partitioned tables with foreign-key references where TRUNCATE ... CASCADE would not remove all data. If you have previously used TRUNCATE ... CASCADE on a partitioned table with foreign-key references please see the "Updating" section for verification and cleanup steps.
  • Fix failure to add foreign key constraints to table with sub-partitions (aka a multi-level partitioned table). If you have previously used this functionality, you can fix it by either detaching and re-attaching the affected partition, or by dropping and re-adding the foreign key constraint to the parent table. You can find more information on how to perform these steps in the ALTER TABLE documentation.
  • Fix performance issue for partitioned tables introduced by the fix for CVE-2017-7484 that now allows the planner to use statistics on a child table for a column that the user is granted access to on the parent table when the query contains a leaky operator.
  • Several other fixes and changes for partitioned tables, including disallowing partition key expressions that return pseudo-types, such as RECORD.
  • Fix for logical replication subscribers for executing per-column UPDATE triggers.
  • Fix for several crashes and failures for logical replication subscribers and publishers.
  • Improve efficiency of logical replication with REPLICA IDENTITY FULL.
  • Ensure that calling pg_replication_slot_advance() on a physical replication slot will persist changes across restarts.
  • Several fixes for the walsender processes.
  • Improve performance of hash joins with very large inner relations.
  • Fix placement of "Subplans Removed" field in EXPLAIN output by placing it with its parent Append or MergeAppend plan.
  • Several fixes for parallel query plans.
  • Several fixes for query planner errors, including one that affected joins to single-row subqueries.
  • Several fixes for MCV extend statistics, including one for incorrect estimation for OR clauses.
  • Improve efficiency of parallel hash join on CPUs with many cores.
  • Ignore the CONCURRENTLY option when performing an index creation, drop, or reindex on a temporary table.
  • Fall back to non-parallel index builds when a parallelized CREATE INDEX has no free dynamic shared memory slots.
  • Several fixes for GiST & GIN indexes.
  • Fix possible crash in BRIN index operations with box, range and inet data types.
  • Fix support for BRIN hypothetical indexes.
  • Fix failure in ALTER TABLE when a column referenced in a GENERATED expression is added or changed in type earlier in the same ALTER TABLE statement.
  • Fix handling of multiple AFTER ROW triggers on a foreign table.
  • Fix off-by-one result for EXTRACT(ISOYEAR FROM timestamp) for BC dates.
  • Prevent unwanted lowercasing and truncation of RADIUS authentication parameters in the pg_hba.conf file.
  • Several fixes for GSSAPI support, including having libpq accept all GSS-related connection parameters even if the GSSAPI code is not compiled in.
  • Several fixes for pg_dump and pg_restore when run in parallel mode.
  • Fix crash with postgres_fdw when trying to execute a remote query on the remote server such as UPDATE remote_tab SET (x,y) = (SELECT ...).
  • Disallow NULL category values in the crosstab() function of contrib/tablefunc to prevent crashes.
  • Several fixes for Windows, including a race condition that could cause timing oddities with NOTIFY.
  • Several ecpg fixes.

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.

If you had previously executed TRUNCATE ... CASCADE on a sub-partition of a partitioned table, and the partitioned table has a foreign-key reference from another table, you may have to execute the TRUNCATE on the other table, or execute a DELETE if you have added rows since running TRUNCATE ... CASCADE. The issue that caused this is fixed in this release, but you will have to perform this step to ensure all of your data is cleaned up.

For more details, please see the release notes.

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