Correct me if I'm wrong, but those all look like sql exploits. Don't those already require some sort of authenticated remote access. They are security issues, but calling them remote code exploitation make them seem more dangerous than they are.

These seem more like privilege escalation, you have access through a database account and use that to gain full access to the whole server. So an issue for multi-tenant databases mostly.

You can do authentication and authorization inside sql. For example you could have something like

    CREATE ROLE initial LOGIN NOINHERIT NOCREATEDB NOCREATEROLE NOSUPERUSER;

And then you run SQL to validate any credentials and then check the database for any permissions, ending with

    SET LOCAL ROLE someuser;

It is uncommon but some people appreciate the simplicity of making the application layer do as little work as possible while pushing work into the database. It’s the logical conclusion after years of telling developers about the N+1 query problem.

that requires additional privelages plus login.. I agree with the pp, sensationalism

ppl host open Postgres instances, one I can think of is https://postpass.geofabrik.de/ where you can query OpenStreetMap data in a Postgres instance exposed over plain HTTP API

Wow, that is... I would have never believed in such a thing.

It's RCE even if it's not pre-auth.

I would call this more of a privilege escalation attack than RCE.

Thanks for actually sharing your path to the zero-day. The context and story helps

Is this exploitable? If it is, this is very serious and if this is an unpatched disclosure millions of Businesses around the world will be affected.

Yes, once you have logged in on a primary.

Isn't that only true if "millions of businesses" choose to hang their PG port out on the Internet with "allow 0/0"? In the spirit of being constructive, https://www.shodan.io/search?query=postgresql shows 516,000 which is definitely not none but pretty far from millions and based on skimming the results pretty far from the businesses part, too

I would consider it a more useful lateral movement vector inside an existing org than anything else. Lots and lots of old postgress with weak acls inside networks.

Amazing write-up. A great look at DB internals and your thought process.