Improper Preservation of Consistency Between Independent Representations of Shared State

Summary

Incomplete tracking in PostgreSQL of tables with row security allows a reused query to view or change different rows from those intended. CVE-2023-2455 and CVE-2016-2193 fixed most interactions between row security and user ID changes. They missed cases where a subquery, WITH query, security invoker view, or SQL-language function references a table with a row-level security policy. This has the same consequences as the two earlier CVEs. That is to say, it leads to potentially incorrect policies being applied where role-specific policies are used and a given query is planned under one role and then executed under other roles. This scenario can happen under security definer functions or when a common user and query are planned initially and then reused across multiple SET ROLEs. Applying an incorrect policy may permit a user to complete otherwise forbidden reads and modifications. This affects only databases that have used CREATE POLICY to define a row security policy. An attacker must tailor an attack to a particular application's pattern of query plan reuse, user ID changes, and role-specific row security policies. The issue affects Postgres versions prior to 12.21, 13.x prior to 13.17, 14.x prior to 14.14, 15.x prior to 15.9, 16.x prior to 16.5, 17.x prior to 17.1.