Privilege escalation via LOAD

From: John Heasman <john(at)ngssoftware(dot)com>
To: pgsql-bugs(at)postgresql(dot)org
Cc: dl-advisories(at)ngssoftware(dot)com
Subject: Privilege escalation via LOAD
Date: 2005-01-21 19:08:44
Message-ID: Pine.WNT.4.61.0501211049190.1264@j2
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Hi guys,

It appears that low privileged users can invoke the LOAD extension to load
arbitrary libraries into the postgres process space. On Windows systems
this is achieved by calling LoadLibrary
(src/backend/port/dynloader/win32.c). The effect of this is that DllMain
will be executed. Since LOAD takes an absolute path, UNC paths may be
used on Windows, thus a low privileged database user can load an arbitrary
library from an anonymous share they have set up, escalating to the
privileges of the database user. I am still investigating the impact on
Unix.

Cheers

John

(this vulnerability was born out of a discussion on #postgresql
between myself, lurka and dennisb).

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