PostgreSQL 9.2.4, 9.1.9, 9.0.13 and 8.4.17 released

EDIT: No, the problem is in parsing, not the existing names: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5492508

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lane_%28computer_scientist...

At the very least I think they should offer an option that only you to restrict access so only your dynos have access to the postgres port.

Another thing I was really hoping for but couldn't find with heroku, was being able to do a point-in-time-restores via the heroku web/cli interface. This would be a seriously nice feature if something like that was available...

The problem is the sheer number of Heroku Runtime machines which are located in a smattering of IP space, and rapidly and accurately propagating the firewall rules required for tight network access control as applications churn around in there...even then, there have been some reports of voluminous firewall rules causing obscure problems. Of course: the world is an obscure place and yet we can deal with it in time. Such a thing could be hardened I'm sure, but the amount of bookkeeping required is a bit terrifying, and experience suggests that will not go entirely smoothly or be easy to find bugs in. At the time this was reasoned out (maybe about two years ago?), it wasn't even widely known that Heroku offered any data storage service of significance. Early days.

So, the simple approach is to enable access from the entire Heroku Runtime layer. But who can put applications there? Anybody on the Internet. That's why the 'ingress' feature to poke a temporary hole in the database firewall was dropped as too marginal given the fairly severe inconvenience of it all -- it had the feel of a weird Heroku-ism, especially in light of the lack of attacks using unauthenticated clients on Postgres, until this date. In addition, what about all the other addons? There would need to be an API, and because of the nature of what it is doing (poking holes before beginning, say, TLS negotiation which requires even more round trips and is slow enough as it is) it would need to be stable, fast, accurate, and all that other good stuff, lest all addons effectively be rendered offline all at once.

Other more application-level approaches are possible (like tunneling all connections to a local unix socket, or something), but that's but a little strange, because it requires code injection of strange stuff into the running container, makes your URLs look funny, and so on. This model has been experimented with by some of my colleagues and staff of other, similar firms, and definitely has its attractive sides. Nevertheless, one of the general guidelines in our implementation choices is to not be too weird for someone moving on or off the service. These approaches are also not in and of themselves immune to DoS or security problems...they need careful auditing. Maybe another look is indicated. And again: what about every other addon? What about your local computer? Are you going to install some weird agent, open source or no, from every such addon?

My personal favorite pie in the sky option right now would be cordon off a slice of contiguous, publicly addressable (but not publicly accessible) IP space so that firewall rules could remain compact and slower changing, and also involve your local computer: imagine being able to VPN to two or three such networks simultaneously, because their addressing does not alias at all. But this is still in the realm of fantasy, and and probably would require looking at IPv6 to be able to segment the address space in a sane manner, which compounds another layer of stuff that can be buggy, even in such mundane details as address parsing.

So....there's some rambling, but I thought it perhaps useful to talk about some of the challenges here to motivate the discussion.

Who is most at risk:

"Any system that allows unrestricted access to the PostgreSQL network port, such as users running PostgreSQL on a public cloud, is especially vulnerable. Users whose servers are only accessible on protected internal networks, or who have effective firewalling or other network access restrictions, are less vulnerable."

So looks like it's low risk but they're not willing to say no risk.

The upgrade (on Debian based systems at least) is for libpq5, postgresql-9.1 and postgresql-client-9.1 . You shouldn't need to do anything else unless, for some strange reason, you actually do have a database starting with "-".

Also, I wish you a fine hike!

(probably commented too late, but I hope you had a nice hike, nonetheless)

Because some folks need to go through a long, drawn out process to upgrade internal software and might already have some place in the pipeline to put the upgrade so it will get tested with everything else.

If its a security issue for your current installation, you go now and hope, but if it can wait for a release then you do that.

The reason I wanted to not upgrade directly is that access was hard at the moment of posting. Upgrading should never wait too long but this was (luckily) defcon 1 for us.

PQconnectdb("host=127.0.0.1 dbname=-exploit user=postgres password=postgres port=5432");

1: http://thehackernews.com/2012/06/cve-2012-2122-serious-mysql...

From the FAQ:

> Persistent Denial of Service: an unauthenticated attacker may use this vulnerability to cause PostgreSQL error messages to be appended to targeted files in the PostgreSQL data directory on the server. Files corrupted in this way may cause the database server to crash, and to refuse to restart. The database server can be fixed either by editing the files and removing the garbage text, or restoring from backup.