BUG #19603: Vuln47: distance_taxicab and distance_chebyshev silently return 0 instead of NaN when a cube coordin

From: PG Bug reporting form <noreply(at)postgresql(dot)org>
To: pgsql-bugs(at)lists(dot)postgresql(dot)org
Cc: 1217816127(at)qq(dot)com
Subject: BUG #19603: Vuln47: distance_taxicab and distance_chebyshev silently return 0 instead of NaN when a cube coordin
Date: 2026-08-03 07:00:47
Message-ID: 19603-7b1f783d5bbfe791@postgresql.org
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The following bug has been logged on the website:

Bug reference: 19603
Logged by: Yuelin Wang
Email address: 1217816127(at)qq(dot)com
PostgreSQL version: 19beta2
Operating system: Linux (Ubuntu 24.04, x86_64)
Description:

### Summary

The static helper distance_1D() in contrib/cube/cube.c classifies two
intervals as "left of", "right of", or "intersecting" using direct floating
point comparisons. When a coordinate is NaN, every comparison evaluates to
false, so the interval falls through to the intersecting branch and the
function returns 0.0 instead of NaN. distance_taxicab and distance_chebyshev
call distance_1D per dimension and sum or max the results, so a single NaN
coordinate silently produces a finite, plausible-looking distance instead of
propagating NaN as IEEE 754 arithmetic normally would.

CWE: CWE-1339. Severity: Low.

### PoC

```sql
CREATE EXTENSION cube;
SELECT distance_chebyshev('(nan,nan)'::cube, '(1,1)'::cube);
SELECT distance_chebyshev('(5,5)'::cube, '(1,nan)'::cube);
SELECT distance_taxicab('(nan)'::cube, '(1)'::cube);
```

### Result

Real captured output from the independent verification run:

```
CREATE EXTENSION
distance_chebyshev
--------------------
0
(1 row)

distance_chebyshev
--------------------
4
(1 row)

distance_taxicab
------------------
0
(1 row)
```

### Impact

A database user who stores or queries cube values containing NaN coordinates
can get silently wrong distance results (e.g. 0 instead of NaN) from
distance_taxicab and distance_chebyshev, which can corrupt nearest-neighbor
search results, ranking, or KNN-index-backed queries that rely on these
operators.

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