RHSA-2017:3402 — Security Advisory

An update for postgresql is now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Moderate. A Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base score, which gives a detailed severity rating, is available for each vulnerability from the CVE link(s) in the References section.

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system (DBMS).

Security Fix(es):

• Privilege escalation flaws were found in the initialization scripts of PostgreSQL. An attacker with access to the postgres user account could use these flaws to obtain root access on the server machine. (CVE-2017-12172, CVE-2017-15097)

Note: This patch drops the script privileges from root to the postgres user. Therefore, this update works properly only if the postgres user has write access to the postgres' home directory, such as the one in the default configuration (/var/lib/pgsql).

Red Hat would like to thank the PostgreSQL project for reporting CVE-2017-12172. The CVE-2017-15097 issue was discovered by Pedro Barbosa (Red Hat) and the PostgreSQL project. Upstream acknowledges Antoine Scemama (Brainloop) as the original reporter of these issues.