• Tom Lane's avatar
    Add heuristic incoming-message-size limits in the server. · 9626325d
    Tom Lane authored
    We had a report of confusing server behavior caused by a client bug
    that sent junk to the server: the server thought the junk was a
    very long message length and waited patiently for data that would
    never come.  We can reduce the risk of that by being less trusting
    about message lengths.
    
    For a long time, libpq has had a heuristic rule that it wouldn't
    believe large message size words, except for a small number of
    message types that are expected to be (potentially) long.  This
    provides some defense against loss of message-boundary sync and
    other corrupted-data cases.  The server does something similar,
    except that up to now it only limited the lengths of messages
    received during the connection authentication phase.  Let's
    do the same as in libpq and put restrictions on the allowed
    length of all messages, while distinguishing between message
    types that are expected to be long and those that aren't.
    
    I used a limit of 10000 bytes for non-long messages.  (libpq's
    corresponding limit is 30000 bytes, but given the asymmetry of
    the FE/BE protocol, there's no good reason why the numbers should
    be the same.)  Experimentation suggests that this is at least a
    factor of 10, maybe a factor of 100, more than we really need;
    but plenty of daylight seems desirable to avoid false positives.
    In any case we can adjust the limit based on beta-test results.
    
    For long messages, set a limit of MaxAllocSize - 1, which is the
    most that we can absorb into the StringInfo buffer that the message
    is collected in.  This just serves to make sure that a bogus message
    size is reported as such, rather than as a confusing gripe about
    not being able to enlarge a string buffer.
    
    While at it, make sure that non-mainline code paths (such as
    COPY FROM STDIN) are as paranoid as SocketBackend is, and validate
    the message type code before believing the message length.
    This provides an additional guard against getting stuck on corrupted
    input.
    
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2003757.1619373089@sss.pgh.pa.us
    9626325d
copyfromparse.c 52.3 KB