PostgreSQL 13.2, 12.6, 11.11, 10.16, 9.6.21, and 9.5.25 Released!

Posted on 2021-02-11 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 13.2, 12.6, 11.11, 10.16, 9.6.21, and 9.5.25. This release closes two security vulnerabilities and fixes over 80 bugs reported over the last three months.

Additionally, this is the final release of PostgreSQL 9.5. If you are running PostgreSQL 9.5 in a production environment, we suggest that you make plans to upgrade.

For the full list of changes, please review the release notes.

Security Issues

CVE-2021-3393: Partition constraint violation errors leak values of denied columns

Versions Affected: 11 - 13.

A user having an UPDATE privilege on a partitioned table but lacking the SELECT privilege on some column may be able to acquire denied-column values from an error message. This is similar to CVE-2014-8161, but the conditions to exploit are more rare.

The PostgreSQL project thanks Heikki Linnakangas for reporting this problem.

CVE-2021-20229: Single-column SELECT privilege enables reading all columns

Versions Affected: 13.

A user having a SELECT privilege on an individual column can craft a special query that returns all columns of the table.

Additionally, a stored view that uses column-level privileges will have incomplete column-usage bitmaps. In installations that depend on column-level permissions for security, it is recommended to execute CREATE OR REPLACE on all user-defined views to force them to be re-parsed.

The PostgreSQL project thanks Sven Klemm for reporting this problem.

Bug Fixes and Improvements

This update fixes over 80 bugs that were reported in the last several months. Some of these issues only affect version 13, but could also apply to other supported versions.

Some of these fixes include:

  • Fix an issue with GiST indexes where concurrent insertions could lead to a corrupt index with entries placed in the wrong pages. You should REINDEX any affected GiST indexes.
  • Fix CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY to ensure rows from concurrent prepared transactions are included in the index. Installations that have enabled prepared transactions should REINDEX any concurrently-built indexes.
  • Fix for possible incorrect query results when a hash aggregation is spilled to disk.
  • Fix edge case in incremental sort that could lead to sorting results incorrectly or a "retrieved too many tuples in a bounded sort" error.
  • Avoid crash when a CALL or DO statement that performs a transaction rollback is executed via extended query protocol, such as from prepared statements.
  • Fix a failure when a PL/pgSQL procedure used CALL on another procedure that has OUT parameters that executed a COMMIT or ROLLBACK.
  • Remove errors from BEFORE UPDATE triggers on partitioned tables for restrictions that no longer apply.
  • Several fixes for queries with joins that could lead to error messages such as "no relation entry for relid N" or "failed to build any N-way joins".
  • Do not consider parallel-restricted or set-returning functions in an ORDER BY expressions when trying to parallelize sorts.
  • Fix ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES to handle duplicate arguments safely.
  • Several fixes in behavior when wal_level is set to minimal, including when tables are rewritten within a transaction.
  • Several fixes for CREATE TABLE LIKE.
  • Ensure that allocated disk space for a dropped relation (e.g. a table) is released promptly when a transaction is committed.
  • Fix progress reporting for CLUSTER.
  • Fix handling of backslash-escaped multibyte characters in COPY FROM.
  • Fix recently-introduced race conditions in LISTEN/NOTIFY queue handling.
  • Allow the jsonb concatenation operator (||) to handle all combinations of JSON data types.
  • Fix WAL-reading logic so that standbys can handle timeline switches correctly. This issue could have shown itself with errors like "requested WAL segment has already been removed".
  • Several leak fixes for the walsender process around logical decoding and replication.
  • Ensure that a nonempty value of krb_server_keyfile always overrides any setting of KRB5_KTNAME in the server environment
  • Several fixes for GSS encryption support.
  • Ensure the \connect command allows the use of a password in the connection_string argument.
  • Fix assorted bugs with the \help command.
  • Several fixes for pg_dump.
  • Ensure that pg_rewind accounts for all WAL when rewinding a standby server.
  • Fix memory leak in contrib/auto_explain.
  • Ensure all postgres_fdw connections are closed if the a user mapping or foreign server object those connections depend on are dropped.
  • Fix JIT compilation to be compatible with LLVM 11 and LLVM 12.

This update also contains tzdata release 2021a for DST law changes in Russia (Volgograd zone) and South Sudan, plus historical corrections for Australia, Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Ghana, Israel, Kenya, Nigeria, Palestine, Seychelles, and Vanuatu.

Notably, the Australia/Currie zone has been corrected to the point where it is identical to Australia/Hobart.

For the full list of changes available, please review the release notes.

PostgreSQL 9.5 is EOL

This is the final release of PostgreSQL 9.5. If you are running PostgreSQL 9.5 in a production environment, we suggest that you make plans to upgrade to a newer, supported version of PostgreSQL. Please see our versioning policy for more information.

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.

For more details, please see the release notes.

NOTE: PostgreSQL 9.6 will stop receiving fixes on November 11, 2021. Please see our versioning policy for more information.

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