Re: Can we still trust plperl?

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:
> I'm wondering if we can reasonably continue to support plperl as
> a trusted language
> would still be plperlu, with the downside that the functions have
> to be installed by a superuser. One of my PGExperts colleagues
> told me his reaction was "Well, I might just as well use plperlu",
> and that pretty well sums up my reaction.
Well, I can see where running plperl with this module would be no
more safe than running plperlu, so I don't really understand the
purpose of the module; however, to install this module you need to:
| Set the PERL5OPT before starting postgres, to something like this:
|     PERL5OPT='-e "require q{plperlinit.pl}"'
| and create a plperlinit.pl file in the same directory as your
| postgres.conf file.
| In the plperlinit.pl file write the code to load this module, plus
| any others you want to load and share subroutines from. 
I don't see where plperl is unsafe unless you do those things.  A
user who can do those things can likely subvert your database in
other ways, no?
-Kevin