Updated postgresql84 and postgresql packages that fix two security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6 respectively. The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having moderate security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section. Description PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system . A flaw was found in the way the crypt password hashing function from the optional PostgreSQL pgcrypto contrib module performed password transformation when used with the DES algorithm. If the password string to be hashed contained the 0x80 byte value, the remainder of the string was ignored when calculating the hash, significantly reducing the password strength. This made brute-force guessing more efficient as the whole password was not required to gain access to protected resources. Note: With this update, the rest of the string is properly included in the DES hash; therefore, any previously stored password values that are affected by this issue will no longer match. In such cases, it will be necessary for those stored password hashes to be updated. A denial of service flaw was found in the way the PostgreSQL server performed a user privileges check when applying SECURITY DEFINER or SET attributes to a procedural language"s call handler function. A non-superuser database owner could use this flaw to cause the PostgreSQL server to crash due to infinite recursion. Upstream acknowledges Rubin Xu and Joseph Bonneau as the original reporters of the CVE-2012-2143 issue. These updated packages upgrade PostgreSQL to version 8.4.12, which fixes these issues as well as several non-security issues. If the postgresql service is running, it will be automatically restarted after installing this update.