CVE-2020-25694

Reconnection can downgrade connection security settings

Many PostgreSQL-provided client applications have options that create additional database connections. Some of those applications reuse only the basic connection parameters (e.g. host, user, port), dropping others. If this drops a security-relevant parameter (e.g. channel_binding, sslmode, requirepeer, gssencmode), the attacker has an opportunity to complete a MITM attack or observe cleartext transmission.

Affected applications are clusterdb, pg_dump, pg_restore, psql, reindexdb, and vacuumdb. The vulnerability arises only if one invokes an affected client application with a connection string containing a security-relevant parameter.

This also fixes how the \connect command of psql reuses connection parameters, i.e. all non-overridden parameters from a previous connection string now re-used.

The PostgreSQL project thanks Peter Eisentraut for reporting this problem.

Version Information

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CVSS 3.0

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