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Security Fix Leads To PostgreSQL Lock Down
hypnosec writes "The developers of the PostgreSQL have announced that they are locking down access to the PostgreSQL repositories to only committers while a fix for a "sufficiently bad" security issue applied. The lock down is temporary and will be lifted once the next release is available. The core committee has announced that they 'apologize in advance for any disruption' adding that 'It seems necessary in this instance, however.'"
That's exactly the point. They've locked out and shrouded the changes that are being made as they're happening, because of wide-spread collaboration causing changes, tests, etc to occur. It's going to be a week before the fix is ready, but as soon as the first bits of test code go in you can quickly target that body of code and figure out the problem, then exploit it. As-is, you now have to rummage through the whole body of vulnerable code and try to guess what's actually broke.
When the repos are opened back up, the fix will be ready. It might (probably) even be shared with the major distros, who will simultaneously have an updated package published. This greatly reduces the likelihood and window of a zero-day exploit with no fix.
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My explanation accounts exactly for that and that was the point. The changes between [VULNERABLE] and [FIXED] are not public yet because the [FIXED] state is not ready for production deployment (it may be wrong, and need more work). That means you can't pop open your source tree, do a `git diff`, and go, "oh, in this code path?" and 20 minutes later have your exploit.
Now, a week from now, this stuff will all be public and fixes will be released. Then you can target exactly what's changed, while everyone else is running updates. This is different from targeting exactly what's changed and then running around buttfucking everyone while they have to wait a week to get production-ready code OR chance it with alpha-grade software in production.
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They sent out a warning to everyone on the mailing list. I know, I got it.
You should not have your PgSQL servers exposed to the world, no any db server. You should apply the fix when it comes out. The reality as an admin is that I know odds are damn near everything we use has as yet undiscovered vulnerabilities.
Migrating anything major to another DB is pretty much a nonstarter. Nor will another DB give you even this much visibility. Oracle would never admit something like this with mysql.