Isn't that only true if "millions of businesses" choose to hang their PG port out on the Internet with "allow 0/0"? In the spirit of being constructive, https://www.shodan.io/search?query=postgresql shows 516,000 which is definitely not none but pretty far from millions and based on skimming the results pretty far from the businesses part, too
I would consider it a more useful lateral movement vector inside an existing org than anything else. Lots and lots of old postgress with weak acls inside networks.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but those all look like sql exploits. Don't those already require some sort of authenticated remote access. They are security issues, but calling them remote code exploitation make them seem more dangerous than they are.
These seem more like privilege escalation, you have access through a database account and use that to gain full access to the whole server. So an issue for multi-tenant databases mostly.
ppl host open Postgres instances, one I can think of is https://postpass.geofabrik.de/ where you can query OpenStreetMap data in a Postgres instance exposed over plain HTTP API
You can do authentication and authorization inside sql. For example you could have something like
CREATE ROLE initial LOGIN NOINHERIT NOCREATEDB NOCREATEROLE NOSUPERUSER;
And then you run SQL to validate any credentials and then check the database for any permissions, ending with
SET LOCAL ROLE someuser;
It is uncommon but some people appreciate the simplicity of making the application layer do as little work as possible while pushing work into the database. It’s the logical conclusion after years of telling developers about the N+1 query problem.
Wow, in my mind this is beyond “code smell” and into code reek!
According to the article, Postgres has an internal Datum that might be a pointer or not a pointer. Okay, this is already a bit risky.
Datum comes along with a small-integer type id. That id is stored separately, presumably for efficiency? Maybe you have lots of Datums and one id and you do this for efficiency. Okay, as long as there is a clear story for why the id stays correctly bound to the datum. The “internal” thing where a bogus AST will cause type confusion makes me think the story here isn’t great.
But then I learn that the type id is something that the code looks up in a system table in the database. I’m speechless. This is the kind of thing that can’t be represented in any safe language because the indication of whether a value is a pointer isn’t even in application memory.
Eww. Maybe the AIs can exhaustively enumerate every code path that might get it wrong and rule them all out in a particular release. Maybe there’s even a Lean program that can verify it. But this is still the kind of design that is wrong by construction and is only okay if every single detail avoids the giant foot-cannon.
igbanam | 4 hours ago
NeuraCryption | 3 hours ago
mattashii | 3 hours ago
mdaniel | 3 hours ago
mgiampapa | 2 hours ago
sailfast | 3 hours ago
jmuguy | 3 hours ago
logophobia | 2 hours ago
These seem more like privilege escalation, you have access through a database account and use that to gain full access to the whole server. So an issue for multi-tenant databases mostly.
knorker | 2 hours ago
vfosnar | 2 hours ago
veqq | an hour ago
kccqzy | an hour ago
mistrial9 | an hour ago
amluto | 26 minutes ago
According to the article, Postgres has an internal Datum that might be a pointer or not a pointer. Okay, this is already a bit risky.
Datum comes along with a small-integer type id. That id is stored separately, presumably for efficiency? Maybe you have lots of Datums and one id and you do this for efficiency. Okay, as long as there is a clear story for why the id stays correctly bound to the datum. The “internal” thing where a bogus AST will cause type confusion makes me think the story here isn’t great.
But then I learn that the type id is something that the code looks up in a system table in the database. I’m speechless. This is the kind of thing that can’t be represented in any safe language because the indication of whether a value is a pointer isn’t even in application memory.
Eww. Maybe the AIs can exhaustively enumerate every code path that might get it wrong and rule them all out in a particular release. Maybe there’s even a Lean program that can verify it. But this is still the kind of design that is wrong by construction and is only okay if every single detail avoids the giant foot-cannon.