What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2015-3166

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 4.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2019-11-20 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-119

Description

The snprintf implementation in PostgreSQL before 9.0.20, 9.1.x before 9.1.16, 9.2.x before 9.2.11, 9.3.x before 9.3.7, and 9.4.x before 9.4.2 does not properly handle system-call errors, which allows attackers to obtain sensitive information or have other unspecified impact via unknown vectors, as demonstrated by an out-of-memory error.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 12.04, 14.04, 14.10, 15.04
• Debian Linux: 7.0, 8.0, 9.0
• PostgreSQL: before 9.0.20; from 9.1 before 9.1.16; from 9.2 before 9.2.11; from 9.3 before 9.3.7; from 9.4 before 9.4.2 — fixed in 9.0.20, 9.1.16, 9.2.11, 9.3.7, 9.4.2

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: PostgreSQL 9.0.20, 9.1.16, 9.2.11, 9.3.7. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://ubuntu.com/usn/usn-2621-1
• http://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3269
• http://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3270
• http://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1587/
• http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/release-9-0-20.html
• http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/release-9-1-16.html
• http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.2/static/release-9-2-11.html
• http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.3/static/release-9-3-7.html
• http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/release-9-4-2.html
• http://ubuntu.com/usn/usn-2621-1
• http://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3269
• http://www.debian.org/security/2015/dsa-3270

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