Debian Security Advisory DSA 165-1 (postgresql)

The remote host is missing an update to postgresql announced via advisory DSA 165-1.

Mordred Labs and others found several vulnerabilities in PostgreSQL, an object-relational SQL database. They are inherited from several buffer overflows and integer overflows. Specially crafted long date and time input, currency, repeat data and long timezone names could cause the PostgreSQL server to crash as well as specially crafted input data for lpad() and rpad(). More buffer/integer overflows were found in circle_poly(), path_encode() and path_addr(). Except for the last three, these problems are fixed in the upstream release 7.2.2 of PostgreSQL which is the recommended version to use. Most of these problems do not exist in the version of PostgreSQL that Debian ships in the potato release since the corresponding functionality is not yet implemented. However, PostgreSQL 6.5.3 is quite old and may bear more risks than we are aware of, which may include further buffer overflows, and certainly include bugs that threaten the integrity of your data. You are strongly advised not to use this release but to upgrade your system to Debian 3.0 (stable) including PostgreSQL release 7.2.1 instead, where many bugs have been fixed and new features introduced to increase compatibility with the SQL standards. If you consider an upgrade, please make sure to dump the entire database system using the pg_dumpall utility. Please take into consideration that the newer PostgreSQL is more strict in its input handling. This means that tests line foo = NULL which are not valid won't be accepted anymore. It also means that when using UNICODE encoding, ISO 8859-1 and ISO 8859-15 are no longer valid incoding to use when inserting data into the relation. In such a case you are advised to convert the dump in question using recode latin1..utf-16. These problems have been fixed in version 7.2.1-2woody2 for the current stable distribution (woody) and in version 7.2.2-2 for the unstable distribution (sid). The old stable distribution (potato) is partially affected and we ship a fixed version 6.5.3-27.2 for it. We recommend that you upgrade your PostgreSQL packages.

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