Re: Range Types - typo + NULL string constructor

On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 12:37 PM, Jeff Davis <pgsql(at)j-davis(dot)com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-10-24 at 13:15 +0300, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
>> Hmm, I don't think that's safe. After Oid wraparound, a range type oid
>> might get reused for some other range type, and the cache would return
>> stale values. Extremely unlikely to happen by accident, but could be
>> exploited by an attacker.
>
> Any ideas on how to remedy that? I don't have another plan for making it
> perform well. Plugging it into the cache invalidation mechanism seems
> like overkill, but I suppose that would solve the problem.
>
> Aren't there a few other cases like this floating around the code? I
> know the single-xid cache is potentially vulnerable to xid wraparound
> for the same reason.

I believe that we're in trouble with XIDs as soon as you have two
active XIDs that are separated by a billion, because then you could
have a situation where some people think a given XID is in the future
and others think it's in the past. I have been wondering if we should
have some sort of active guard against that scenario; I don't think we
do at present.

But OID wraparound is not the same as XID wraparound. It's far more
common, I think, for a single transaction to use lots of OIDs than it
is for it to use lots of XIDs (i.e. have many subtransactions).

--
Robert Haas
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