Prevent dangling-pointer access when update trigger returns old tuple.
A before-update row trigger may choose to return the "new" or "old" tuple unmodified. ExecBRUpdateTriggers failed to consider the second possibility, and would proceed to free the "old" tuple even if it was the one returned, leading to subsequent access to already-deallocated memory. In debug builds this reliably leads to an "invalid memory alloc request size" failure; in production builds it might accidentally work, but data corruption is also possible. This is a very old bug. There are probably a couple of reasons it hasn't been noticed up to now. It would be more usual to return NULL if one wanted to suppress the update action; returning "old" is significantly less efficient since the update will occur anyway. Also, none of the standard PLs would ever cause this because they all returned freshly-manufactured tuples even if they were just copying "old". But commit 4b93f579 changed that for plpgsql, making it possible to see the bug with a plpgsql trigger. Still, this is certainly legal behavior for a trigger function, so it's ExecBRUpdateTriggers's fault not plpgsql's. It seems worth creating a test case that exercises returning "old" directly with a C-language trigger; testing this through plpgsql seems unreliable because its behavior might change again. Report and fix by Rushabh Lathia; regression test case by me. Back-patch to all supported branches. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAGPqQf1P4pjiNPrMof=P_16E-DFjt457j+nH2ex3=nBTew7tXw@mail.gmail.com
Showing
Please register or sign in to comment