Vulnerability in core server (CVE-2022-1552)

Autovacuum, REINDEX, and others omit “security restricted operation” sandbox

Autovacuum, REINDEX, CREATE INDEX, REFRESH MATERIALIZED VIEW, CLUSTER, and pg_amcheck made incomplete efforts to operate safely when a privileged user is maintaining another user’s objects. Those commands activated relevant protections too late or not at all. An attacker having permission to create non-temp objects in at least one schema could execute arbitrary SQL functions under a superuser identity.

While promptly updating PostgreSQL is the best remediation for most users, a user unable to do that can work around the vulnerability by disabling autovacuum, not manually running the above commands, and not restoring from output of the pg_dump command. Performance may degrade quickly under this workaround. VACUUM is safe, and all commands are fine when a trusted user owns the target object.

The PostgreSQL project thanks Alexander Lakhin for reporting this problem.