Why are absolute paths considered a security risk?

Hadley Willan <hadley.willan@deeperdesign.co.nz> writes:

The documentation (7.2.1) mentions that allowing absolute paths when
creating a db is a security risk and is off by default.
However, it seems fairly hard to exploit, and I was wondering if anybody
has any examples of how much of a risk this is?
Reason I ask is we're considering turning them on in our server and want
to consider these risks.

The difficulty is that someone who is allowed to create databases (but
isn't necessarily a superuser) will be able to cause the backend to
scribble in any directory that the postgres user has write access to.
The potential damage is somewhat limited since "base/DBOID" gets tacked
onto the user-specified string, and the user has little if any control
over the DBOID part. Still, it's a risk.

regards, tom lane

Okay, this is fairly minor, and in our situation non-existant
considering that the only user capable of creating databases is
postgres.

Thanks for your help.

Hadley

On Wed, 2003-02-26 at 13:31, Tom Lane wrote:

Hadley Willan <hadley.willan@deeperdesign.co.nz> writes:

The documentation (7.2.1) mentions that allowing absolute paths when
creating a db is a security risk and is off by default.
However, it seems fairly hard to exploit, and I was wondering if anybody
has any examples of how much of a risk this is?
Reason I ask is we're considering turning them on in our server and want
to consider these risks.

The difficulty is that someone who is allowed to create databases (but
isn't necessarily a superuser) will be able to cause the backend to
scribble in any directory that the postgres user has write access to.
The potential damage is somewhat limited since "base/DBOID" gets tacked
onto the user-specified string, and the user has little if any control
over the DBOID part. Still, it's a risk.

regards, tom lane

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