pgsql: Fix improper interactions between session_authorization and role - Mailing list pgsql-committers

From Tom Lane
Subject pgsql: Fix improper interactions between session_authorization and role
Date
Msg-id E1tAWMn-001JwS-Tz@gemulon.postgresql.org
Whole thread Raw
List pgsql-committers
Fix improper interactions between session_authorization and role.

The SQL spec mandates that SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION implies
SET ROLE NONE.  We tried to implement that within the lowest-level
functions that manipulate these settings, but that was a bad idea.
In particular, guc.c assumes that it doesn't matter in what order
it applies GUC variable updates, but that was not the case for these
two variables.  This problem, compounded by some hackish attempts to
work around it, led to some security-grade issues:

* Rolling back a transaction that had done SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION
would revert to SET ROLE NONE, even if that had not been the previous
state, so that the effective user ID might now be different from what
it had been.

* The same for SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION in a function SET clause.

* If a parallel worker inspected current_setting('role'), it saw
"none" even when it should see something else.

Also, although the parallel worker startup code intended to cope
with the current role's pg_authid row having disappeared, its
implementation of that was incomplete so it would still fail.

Fix by fully separating the miscinit.c functions that assign
session_authorization from those that assign role.  To implement the
spec's requirement, teach set_config_option itself to perform "SET
ROLE NONE" when it sets session_authorization.  (This is undoubtedly
ugly, but the alternatives seem worse.  In particular, there's no way
to do it within assign_session_authorization without incompatible
changes in the API for GUC assign hooks.)  Also, improve
ParallelWorkerMain to directly set all the relevant user-ID variables
instead of relying on some of them to get set indirectly.  That
allows us to survive not finding the pg_authid row during worker
startup.

In v16 and earlier, this includes back-patching 9987a7bf3 which
fixed a violation of GUC coding rules: SetSessionAuthorization
is not an appropriate place to be throwing errors from.

Security: CVE-2024-10978

Branch
------
REL_13_STABLE

Details
-------
https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/76123ded6e9b3624e380ac326645bd026aacd2f5

Modified Files
--------------
src/backend/access/transam/parallel.c    |  36 +++++--
src/backend/commands/variable.c          | 101 ++++++++++++++------
src/backend/utils/init/miscinit.c        | 157 ++++++++++++++++++-------------
src/backend/utils/misc/guc.c             |  40 ++++++--
src/include/miscadmin.h                  |   3 +
src/test/regress/expected/privileges.out |  73 ++++++++++++++
src/test/regress/sql/privileges.sql      |  40 ++++++++
7 files changed, 341 insertions(+), 109 deletions(-)


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