Abandon the use of Perl's Safe.pm to enforce restrictions in plperl, as it is

fundamentally insecure. Instead apply an opmask to the whole interpreter that
imposes restrictions on unsafe operations. These restrictions are much harder
to subvert than is Safe.pm, since there is no container to be broken out of.
Backported to release 7.4.

In releases 7.4, 8.0 and 8.1 this also includes the necessary backporting of
the two interpreters model for plperl and plperlu adopted in release 8.2.

In versions 8.0 and up, the use of Perl's POSIX module to undo its locale
mangling on Windows has become insecure with these changes, so it is
replaced by our own routine, which is also faster.

Nice side effects of the changes include that it is now possible to use perl's
"strict" pragma in a natural way in plperl, and that perl's $a and
$b variables now work as expected in sort routines, and that function
compilation is significantly faster.

Tim Bunce and Andrew Dunstan, with reviews from Alex Hunsaker and
Alexey Klyukin.

Security: CVE-2010-1169

1 files changed, 10 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/doc/src/sgml/plperl.sgml b/doc/src/sgml/plperl.sgml
index c4129510fc1..7d17002acff 100644
--- a/doc/src/sgml/plperl.sgml
+++ b/doc/src/sgml/plperl.sgml
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-<!-- $PostgreSQL: pgsql/doc/src/sgml/plperl.sgml,v 2.83 2010/04/03 07:22:55 petere Exp $ -->
+<!-- $PostgreSQL: pgsql/doc/src/sgml/plperl.sgml,v 2.84 2010/05/13 16:39:43 adunstan Exp $ -->
 
  <chapter id="plperl">
   <title>PL/Perl - Perl Procedural Language</title>
@@ -1154,11 +1154,19 @@ CREATE TRIGGER test_valid_id_trig
        into a module and loaded by the <literal>on_init</> string.
        Examples:
 <programlisting>
-plperl.on_init = '$ENV{NYTPROF}="start=no"; require Devel::NYTProf::PgPLPerl'
+plperl.on_init = 'require "plperlinit.pl"'
 plperl.on_init = 'use lib "/my/app"; use MyApp::PgInit;'
 </programlisting>
        </para>
        <para>
+       Any modules loaded by <literal>plperl.on_init</>, either directly or
+       indirectly, will be available for use by <literal>plperl</>.  This may
+       create a security risk. To see what modules have been loaded you can use:
+<programlisting>
+DO 'elog(WARNING, join ", ", sort keys %INC)' language plperl;
+</programlisting>
+       </para>
+       <para>
        Initialization will happen in the postmaster if the plperl library is included
        in <literal>shared_preload_libraries</> (see <xref linkend="guc-shared-preload-libraries">),
        in which case extra consideration should be given to the risk of destabilizing the postmaster.