22-Year-Old PostgreSQL Bug Turned into Remote Code Execution

In one line

If you had told me in April 2026 one question “Mehmet, can we use managed PostgreSQL for this project?” would send me into the deepest rabbit hole of my life, I would have laughed. Months later, I finally found the bottom of that rabbit hole. It was a 22-year-old zero-day in PostgreSQL core. In this […]

Opening excerpt

Months later, I finally found the bottom of that rabbit hole. It was a 22-year-old zero-day in PostgreSQL core.

In this blog post you will read a story of how I ended up uncovering a new class of type-confusion vulnerabilities in PostgreSQL.

This is the 3rd part of blog post series named “ Systemic Risks in the Managed PostgreSQL Industry ”. For those who have missed the first two part, feel free to start from 1st and 2nd which will give you a complete context of this madness.

I gave PostgreSQL a value inside a composite type, changed the type of one of its fields, and asked it to read the value back. That type confusion led to one of the most reliable memory-corruption exploit I have seen. But I did not start by looking for a PostgreSQL core vulnerability.

(Excerpted from the original; full article via the source link below.)

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