Steffen Joeris discovered that PyGreSQL 3.8 did not use PostgreSQL’s safe string and bytea functions in its own escaping functions. As a result, applications written to use PyGreSQL’s escaping functions are vulnerable to SQL injections when processing certain multi-byte character sequences. Because the safe functions require a database connection, to maintain backwards compatibility, pg.escape_string() and pg.escape_bytea() are still available, but applications will have to be adjusted to use the new pyobj.escape_string() and pyobj.escape_bytea() functions. For example, code containing:
import pg connection = pg.connect(…) escaped = pg.escape_string(untrusted_input)
11 December 2009
A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:
Steffen Joeris discovered that PyGreSQL 3.8 did not use PostgreSQL’s safe string and bytea functions in its own escaping functions. As a result, applications written to use PyGreSQL’s escaping functions are vulnerable to SQL injections when processing certain multi-byte character sequences. Because the safe functions require a database connection, to maintain backwards compatibility, pg.escape_string() and pg.escape_bytea() are still available, but applications will have to be adjusted to use the new pyobj.escape_string() and pyobj.escape_bytea() functions. For example, code containing:
import pg connection = pg.connect(…) escaped = pg.escape_string(untrusted_input)
should be adjusted to use:
import pg connection = pg.connect(…) escaped = connection.escape_string(untrusted_input)
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.