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Hemanth Sandrana
Hemanth Sandrana
Jelte Fennema-Nio
Jelte Fennema-Nio
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#1Hemanth SandranaHemanth Sandrana
Oct 19, 2023
#2Jelte Fennema-Nio↳Jelte Fennema-Nioto Hemanth Sandrana (#1)
Oct 19, 2023

prevent non-superuser terminate bgworker running as superuser

Started by Hemanth Sandranaalmost 3 years ago2 messageshackers
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Hackorum builds and tests every patch posted to the lists, not only commitfest submissions. This is Hackorum's own CI rather than the PostgreSQL project's, and it is still under testing - please report anything that looks wrong.

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You can run a PostgreSQL built from this patch straight from Docker, with no checkout and no build:

docker run --rm -p 5432:5432 ghcr.io/hackorum-dev/postgres-patch:t48615
psql -h localhost -U postgres

Built from patchset v1 (message #1), July 27, 2026 at 11:54 PM.

Every patchset is also pushed to a branch of our PostgreSQL fork, so you can check out the same tree CI built. Without a PostgreSQL checkout:

git clone --branch t48615_1 https://github.com/hackorum-dev/postgres.git

In a checkout you already have, add the fork once:

git remote add hackorum https://github.com/hackorum-dev/postgres.git

then, for this patchset and every later one:

git fetch hackorum t48615_1 && git checkout t48615_1

Patchset v1 (message #1) is on t48615_1

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#1Hemanth Sandrana
Hemanth Sandrana
hemanthforpostgres@gmail.com

Hi All,

Currently, BackgroundWorker connected to a database by calling
BackgroundWorkerInitializeConnection with username as NULL can be
terminated by non-superuser with pg_signal_backend privilege. When the
username is NULL the bgworker process runs as superuser (which is
expected as per the documentation -
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/bgworker.html ), but can the
non-superuser (with pg_signal_backend) terminate this superuser owned
process?
We (Mahendrakar and Myself) think that this is a bug and proposing a
fix that sets MyProc->roleId to BOOTSTRAP_SUPERUSERID, similar to
InitializeSessionUserId, to prevent non-superuser terminating it.

Please let us know your comments.

Thanks,
Hemanth Sandrana

Attachments:

t48615_1
v1-0001-prevent-non-superuser-terminating-superuser-owned.patchapplication/octet-stream; name=v1-0001-prevent-non-superuser-terminating-superuser-owned.patchDownload+3-1
#2Jelte Fennema-Nio
Jelte Fennema-Nio
postgres@jeltef.nl
In reply to: Hemanth Sandrana (#1)
Re: prevent non-superuser terminate bgworker running as superuser

This seems like it should even be considered a security honestly.

On Thu, 19 Oct 2023, 19:49 Hemanth Sandrana, <hemanthforpostgres@gmail.com>
wrote:

Show quoted text

Hi All,

Currently, BackgroundWorker connected to a database by calling
BackgroundWorkerInitializeConnection with username as NULL can be
terminated by non-superuser with pg_signal_backend privilege. When the
username is NULL the bgworker process runs as superuser (which is
expected as per the documentation -
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/bgworker.html ), but can the
non-superuser (with pg_signal_backend) terminate this superuser owned
process?
We (Mahendrakar and Myself) think that this is a bug and proposing a
fix that sets MyProc->roleId to BOOTSTRAP_SUPERUSERID, similar to
InitializeSessionUserId, to prevent non-superuser terminating it.

Please let us know your comments.

Thanks,
Hemanth Sandrana

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