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Then how would a user use the db? Not every use of a database is behind a web application.


Well, once could use something like spiped[1], which would add a very large roadblock to any attacker.

[1]: http://www.tarsnap.com/spiped.html


This is perfectly compatible with Postgres.

However this does not prevent any of your employees or other users of systems with access to use spipped from committing this attack. You still need a client somewhere and the server is still vulnerable.

Allowing remote connections from any IP to your database, like heroku apparently does, sounds kind of crazy to me. I can't believe they do it. But limiting and encrypting that access just limits, and does not eliminate your vulnerability to this bug.

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Just to be really clear: Say your corporate blog stores it’s data in your main Postgres instance. As blogging engines tend to, it has a bug, and hackers succeed in using that to get access to your blog’s server. Even if you are using spiped to connect the 2 boxes they still have the ability to mess with your main database, on some other, probably much better secured, box. This bug is ugly.




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