A dump/restore is not required for those running 7.4.X. However, it is one possible way of handling two significant security problems that have been found in the initial contents of 7.4.X system catalogs. A dump/initdb/reload sequence using 7.4.8's initdb will automatically correct these problems.

The larger security problem is that the built-in character set encoding conversion functions can be invoked from SQL commands by unprivileged users, but the functions were not designed for such use and are not secure against malicious choices of arguments. The fix involves changing the declared parameter list of these functions so that they can no longer be invoked from SQL commands. (This does not affect their normal use by the encoding conversion machinery.)

The lesser problem is that the contrib/tsearch2 module creates several functions that are misdeclared to return internal when they do not accept internal arguments. This breaks type safety for all functions using internal arguments.

It is strongly recommended that all installations repair these errors, either by initdb or by following the manual repair procedures given below. The errors at least allow unprivileged database users to crash their server process, and might allow unprivileged users to gain the privileges of a database superuser.

If you wish not to do an initdb, perform the following procedures instead. As the database superuser, do:

BEGIN;
UPDATE pg_proc SET proargtypes[3] = 'internal'::regtype
WHERE pronamespace = 11 AND pronargs = 5
     AND proargtypes[2] = 'cstring'::regtype;
-- The command should report having updated 90 rows;
-- if not, rollback and investigate instead of committing!
COMMIT;

Next, if you have installed contrib/tsearch2, do:

BEGIN;
UPDATE pg_proc SET proargtypes[0] = 'internal'::regtype
WHERE oid IN (
   'dex_init(text)'::regprocedure,
   'snb_en_init(text)'::regprocedure,
   'snb_ru_init(text)'::regprocedure,
   'spell_init(text)'::regprocedure,
   'syn_init(text)'::regprocedure
);
-- The command should report having updated 5 rows;
-- if not, rollback and investigate instead of committing!
COMMIT;

If this command fails with a message like “function "dex_init(text)" does not exist”, then either tsearch2 is not installed in this database, or you already did the update.

The above procedures must be carried out in each database of an installation, including template1, and ideally including template0 as well. If you do not fix the template databases then any subsequently created databases will contain the same errors. template1 can be fixed in the same way as any other database, but fixing template0 requires additional steps. First, from any database issue:

UPDATE pg_database SET datallowconn = true WHERE datname = 'template0';

Next connect to template0 and perform the above repair procedures. Finally, do:

-- re-freeze template0:
VACUUM FREEZE;
-- and protect it against future alterations:
UPDATE pg_database SET datallowconn = false WHERE datname = 'template0';