Two vulnerabilities related to XML processing were discovered in PostgreSQL, an SQL database. CVE-2012-3488contrib/xml2's xslt_process() can be used to read and write external files and URLs. CVE-2012-3489xml_parse() fetches external files or URLs to resolve DTD and entity references in XML values. This update removes the problematic functionality, potentially breaking applications which use it in a legitimate way. Due to the nature of these vulnerabilities, it is possible that attackers who have only indirect access to the database can supply crafted XML data which exploits this vulnerability.

For the stable distribution (squeeze), these problems have been fixed in version 8.4.13-0squeeze1. For the unstable distribution (sid), these problems have been fixed in version 9.1.5-1 of the postgresql-9.1 package. We recommend that you upgrade your postgresql-8.4 packages.

PostgreSQL is a fully featured object-relational database management system. It supports a large part of the SQL standard and is designed to be extensible by users in many aspects. Some of the features are: ACID transactions, foreign keys, views, sequences, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions, outer joins, multiversion concurrency control. Graphical user interfaces and bindings for many programming languages are available as well.

postgresql-8.4 on Debian Linux

This check tests the installed software version using the apt package manager.

• http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2534.html

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Updated on 2015-03-25