Security releases 2.0.6 and 2.1.3

May 19, 2014 release 2 2.1

It has come to our attention that the PostGIS Raster support may give more privileges to users than an administrator is willing to grant. These include reading files from the filesystem and opening connections to network hosts.

Both issues can be limited in existing installations by setting the GDAL_SKIP variable (in the PostgreSQL server environment) to the list of all gdal drivers, but some drivers would still be forceably loaded by some operations.

Releases 2.1.3 and 2.0.6 strengthen the code to load no drivers by default and allows for a fine-grained tuning of what’s allowed and what not through postgis-specific environment variables:

POSTGIS_GDAL_ENABLED_DRIVERS Specifies a list of GDAL drivers to enable (rather than skip) By default all drivers are disabled. Example value: “GTiff PNG JPEG”
POSTGIS_ENABLE_OUTDB_RASTERS Enables read support for out-db raster bands if set to 1. By default out-db raster bands reading is disabled.

Upgrade is highly recommended, especially for online services allowing users to run arbitrary SQL queries.

Downloads:

<https://download.osgeo.org/postgis/source/postgis-2.0.6.tar.gz> MD5: ba6fc0a3f13b86e83cd8db1532110636
<https://download.osgeo.org/postgis/source/postgis-2.1.3.tar.gz> MD5: 104e4468429ea0882259fc268c62d6c7

Special thanks to Even Rouault for bringing up the issue and giving advice on its resolution.