• Announcements

2020-02-25

[email protected] release

[email protected] is being released which contains a handful of breaking changes.

I will outline each breaking change here and try to give some historical context on them. Most of them are small and subtle and likely wont impact you; however, there is one larger breaking change you will likely run into:

  • Support all tls.connect options being passed to the client/pool constructor under the ssl option.

Previously we white listed the parameters passed here and did slight massaging of some of them. The main breaking change here is that now if you do this:

const client = new Client({ ssl: true })
⚠️

Now we will use the default ssl options to tls.connect which includes rejectUnauthorized being enabled. This means your connection attempt may fail if you are using a self-signed cert. To use the old behavior you should do this:

const client = new Client({ ssl: { rejectUnauthorized: false } })

This makes pg a bit more secure "out of the box" while still enabling you to opt in to the old behavior.

The rest of the changes are relatively minor & you likely wont need to do anything, but good to be aware none the less!

  • change default database name

If a database name is not specified, available in the environment at PGDATABASE, or available at pg.defaults, we used to use the username of the process user as the name of the database. Now we will use the user property supplied to the client as the database name, if it exists. What this means is this:

new Client({
  user: 'foo',
})

[email protected] will default the database name to the process user. [email protected] will use the user property supplied to the client. If you have not supplied user to the client, and it isn't available through any of its existing lookup mechanisms (environment variables, pg.defaults) then it will still use the process user for the database name.

  • drop support for versions of node older than 8.0

[email protected] has been out of LTS for quite some time now, and I've removed it from our test matrix. [email protected] may still work on older versions of node, but it isn't a goal of the project anymore. [email protected] is actually no longer in the LTS support line, but pg will continue to test against and support 8.0 until there is a compelling reason to drop support for it. Any security vulnerability issues which come up I will back-port fixes to the [email protected] line and do a release, but any other fixes or improvments will not be back ported.

  • prevent password from being logged accidentally

[email protected] makes the password field on the pool and client non-enumerable. This means when you do console.log(client) you wont have your database password printed out unintenionally. You can still do console.log(client.password) if you really want to see it!

  • make pg.native non-enumerable

You can use pg.native.Client to access the native client. The first time you access the pg.native getter it imports the native bindings...which must be installed. In some cases (such as webpacking the pg code for lambda deployment) the .native property would be traversed and trigger an import of the native bindings as a side-effect. Making this property non-enumerable will fix this issue. An easy fix, but its technically a breaking change in cases where people are relying on this side effect for any reason.

  • make pg.Pool an es6 class

This makes extending pg.Pool possible. Previously it was not a "proper" es6 class and class MyPool extends pg.Pool wouldn't work.

  • make Notice messages not an instance of a JavaScript error

The code path for parsing notice and error messages from the postgres backend is the same. Previously created a JavaScript Error instance for both of these message types. Now, only actual errors from the postgres backend will be an instance of an Error. The shape and properties of the two messages did not change outside of this.

  • monorepo

While not technically a breaking change for the module itself, I have begun the process of consolidating separate repos into the main repo and converted it into a monorepo managed by lerna. This will help me stay on top of issues better (it was hard to bounce between 3-4 separate repos) and coordinate bug fixes and changes between dependant modules.

Thanks for reading that! pg tries to be super pedantic about not breaking backwards-compatibility in non semver major releases....even for seemingly small things. If you ever notice a breaking change on a semver minor/patch release please stop by the repo and open an issue!

If you find pg valuable to you or your business please consider supporting it's continued development! Big performance improvements, typescript, better docs, query pipelining and more are all in the works!

2019-07-18

New documentation

After a very long time on my todo list I've ported the docs from my old hand-rolled webapp running on route53 + elb + ec2 + dokku (I know, I went overboard!) to gatsby hosted on netlify which is so much easier to manage. I've released the code at https://github.com/brianc/node-postgres-docs and invite your contributions! Let's make this documentation better together. Any time changes are merged to master on the documentation repo it will automatically deploy.

If you see an error in the docs, big or small, use the "edit on GitHub" button to edit the page & submit a pull request right there. I'll get a new version out ASAP with your changes! If you want to add new pages of documentation open an issue if you need guidance, and I'll help you get started.

I want to extend a special thank you to all the supporters and contributors to the project that have helped keep me going through times of burnout or life "getting in the way." ❤️

It's been quite a journey, and I look forward continuing it for as long as I can provide value to all y'all. 🤠

2017-08-12

code execution vulnerability

Today @sehrope found and reported a code execution vulnerability in node-postgres. This affects all versions from [email protected] through [email protected].

I have published a fix on the tip of each major version branch of all affected versions as well as a fix on each minor version branch of [email protected] and [email protected]:

Fixes

The following versions have been published to npm & contain a patch to fix the vulnerability:

Example

To demonstrate the issue & see if you are vunerable execute the following in node:

import pg from 'pg'
const { Client } = pg
const client = new Client()
client.connect()
 
const sql = `SELECT 1 AS "\\'/*", 2 AS "\\'*/\n + console.log(process.env)] = null;\n//"`
 
client.query(sql, (err, res) => {
  client.end()
})

You will see your environment variables printed to your console. An attacker can use this exploit to execute any arbitrary node code within your process.

Impact

This vulnerability likely does not impact you if you are connecting to a database you control and not executing user-supplied sql. Still, you should absolutely upgrade to the most recent patch version as soon as possible to be safe.

Two attack vectors we quickly thought of:

  • 1 - executing unsafe, user-supplied sql which contains a malicious column name like the one above.
  • 2 - connecting to an untrusted database and executing a query which returns results where any of the column names are malicious.

Support

I have created an issue you can use to discuss the vulnerability with me or ask questions, and I have reported this issue on twitter and directly to Heroku and nodesecurity.io.

I take security very seriously. If you or your company benefit from node-postgres please sponsor my work: this type of issue is one of the many things I am responsible for, and I want to be able to continue to tirelessly provide a world-class PostgreSQL experience in node for years to come.

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