USN-288-1 described a PostgreSQL client vulnerability in the way the >>‘<< character is escaped in SQL queries. It was determined that the PostgreSQL backends of Exim, Dovecot, and Postfix used this unsafe escaping method.
For reference, these are the details of the original USN:
9 June 2006
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
USN-288-1 described a PostgreSQL client vulnerability in the way the >>‘<< character is escaped in SQL queries. It was determined that the PostgreSQL backends of Exim, Dovecot, and Postfix used this unsafe escaping method.
For reference, these are the details of the original USN:
CVE-2006-2313: Akio Ishida and Yasuo Ohgaki discovered a weakness in the handling of invalidly-encoded multibyte text data. If a client application processed untrusted input without respecting its encoding and applied standard string escaping techniques (such as replacing a single quote >>‘<< with >>\’<< or >>“<<), the PostgreSQL server could interpret the resulting string in a way that allowed an attacker to inject arbitrary SQL commands into the resulting SQL query. The PostgreSQL server has been modified to reject such invalidly encoded strings now, which completely fixes the problem for some ‘safe’ multibyte encodings like UTF-8.
CVE-2006-2314: However, there are some less popular and client-only multibyte encodings (such as SJIS, BIG5, GBK, GB18030, and UHC) which contain valid multibyte characters that end with the byte 0x5c, which is the representation of the backslash character >><< in ASCII. Many client libraries and applications use the non-standard, but popular way of escaping the >>‘<< character by replacing all occurences of it with >>\’<<. If a client application uses one of the affected encodings and does not interpret multibyte characters, and an attacker supplies a specially crafted byte sequence as an input string parameter, this escaping method would then produce a validly-encoded character and an excess >>‘<< character which would end the string. All subsequent characters would then be interpreted as SQL code, so the attacker could execute arbitrary SQL commands.
Vulmon
To fix this vulnerability end-to-end, client-side applications must
be fixed to properly interpret multibyte encodings and use >>''<<
instead of >>\'<<. However, as a precautionary measure, the sequence
>>\'<< is now regarded as invalid when one of the affected client
encodings is in use. If you depend on the previous behaviour, you
can restore it by setting 'backslash_quote = on' in postgresql.conf.
However, please be aware that this could render you vulnerable
again.
This issue does not affect you if you only use single-byte (like
SQL_ASCII or the ISO-8859-X family) or unaffected multibyte (like
UTF-8) encodings.
Please see http://www.postgresql.org/docs/techdocs.50 for further details.
The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:
To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.
In general, a standard system upgrade is sufficient to effect the necessary changes.