PostgreSQL

Passwordless Kubernetes Image Pulling with Artifact Keeper via ServiceAccount Tokens

Kubernetes 1.34 and later enables kubelet to forward a pod's ServiceAccount token to an external image credential provider plugin, allowing the plugin to exchange it for short-lived read-only credentials from a compatible registry. Artifact Keeper, an open-source Rust-based OCI and package registry, implements an OIDC provider that validates these tokens and issues temporary credentials without requiring imagePullSecrets in manifests. The approach follows zero-trust principles by eliminating long-lived secrets that can leak across namespaces or clusters. A custom credential provider binary handles the token exchange, enforces audience restrictions, and redacts sensitive data from logs. The solution requires specific ClusterRole permissions for nodes, kubelet flags, and registry-side OIDC mappings that bind Kubernetes namespaces to read-only groups. Testing on kind 1.34.3 confirmed successful pulls for authorized ServiceAccounts and clear 401 errors for unauthorized ones when imagePullPolicy is set to Always.

Prod is Down: Free gVisor-Based Simulator Gives Strangers Root Access for Realistic Linux Incident Training

A Russian systems administrator has launched Prod is Down, a free online platform that lets users practice real incident response by granting them root consoles on deliberately broken Linux servers. The tool currently offers 13 scenarios covering PostgreSQL failures, OOM Killer events, full disks, expired certificates, nginx 502 errors, inode exhaustion, DNS issues, and open file limits. Each exercise runs inside gVisor sandboxes with strict resource limits, internal-only networking, and automated verification that checks service health rather than player commands. The author implemented an emulated systemd in Python so trainees can use familiar systemctl and journalctl commands without running a real init system. Multiple layers of isolation, including overlay filesystem tweaks and size monitoring, prevent abuse while still allowing sudo and realistic debugging. The platform records three random variants per scenario so memorized fixes from previous runs do not work on subsequent attempts.

AI Agent Workflow Exceeds 100-Unit ERP Limit Reaching 120 Due to Check-Then-Act Race Condition

A detailed case study demonstrates how an AI workflow authorized to order no more than 100 units of COMP-17 ended up creating 120 units across three suppliers. Each individual order of 40 units passed authorization checks returning ALLOW, yet the cumulative result violated the human-delegated mandate. The root cause was a classic check-then-act race condition where stateful permission tracking read the same initial balance concurrently before any updates occurred. Sequential stateful checks prevented the overrun, but concurrent execution allowed all three requests to read zero consumption and receive ALLOW. An improved design using PostgreSQL SELECT FOR UPDATE performs atomic reservation of the grant balance before calling the ERP system, ensuring only two orders succeed and the third is rejected with DENY_CAPACITY. The experiment used a deterministic planner without any LLM to isolate the authorization mechanism from model reasoning quality. Five key questions are provided for production deployments involving cumulative business limits delegated to agents.

Anthropic OSS Scanner Uncovers 29,439 Vulnerability Candidates in Open Source Projects, Delivering 6,157 Reports and 516 Fixes

Anthropic has published detailed metrics from its six-month coordinated vulnerability disclosure program that preceded the launch of its automated OSS Scanner service. The company’s models identified 29,439 potential vulnerabilities, of which external firms verified 6,123 candidates and confirmed 5,674 as genuine issues. From the 6,157 reports sent to maintainers across 591 projects, only 516 fixes have been merged so far, representing an 8.4 percent remediation rate among delivered reports. Anthropic emphasizes that 78 percent of reports were sent without independent human triage, and the new OSS Scanner now delivers fully model-generated findings directly to approved projects. Maintainers from PostgreSQL, curl, OpenSSL, wolfSSL and HotCRP have praised the quality of recent reports while noting that earlier AI-generated submissions were largely noise. The dashboard snapshot dated 2 October 2026 shows that 584 identifiers (219 CVE and 365 GHSA) have been issued, yet many confirmed issues remain in the triage queue due to limited human resources.

Passkeys in Production: How One Developer Replaced Passwords with Face ID in Three Days Using FastAPI and Next.js

Yaroslav Morozov details a complete production implementation of Passkeys based on the WebAuthn standard and FIDO2 protocols. The article explains why Passkeys eliminate phishing and database breach risks compared to traditional passwords while providing biometric login via Face ID or Touch ID. It covers database schema design with PostgreSQL tables for credentials and challenges, SQLAlchemy models, and minimal dependencies including py-webauthn on the backend and SimpleWebAuthn on the frontend. Full working code for registration and authentication flows is provided, showing how Passkeys integrate with existing JWT token systems without major refactoring. The guide includes environment configuration, error handling, challenge management with five-minute TTL, and security considerations such as sign count verification to detect cloned keys.

Splunk Enterprise Discloses 46 Vulnerabilities Including Critical Patroni Authentication Flaw

Splunk has published three security advisories detailing a total of 46 vulnerabilities affecting Splunk Enterprise and related components. Three of the issues were rated critical, with CVE-2026-76268 receiving a CVSS v3.1 base score of 9.8. The flaw resides in the Patroni REST API used for PostgreSQL cluster management within search head clusters, allowing unauthenticated remote attackers to execute arbitrary operating system commands. Another high-severity issue, CVE-2026-76266, enables local privilege escalation to root on Linux systems during package updates. The remaining vulnerabilities cover product code, internally identified problems, and third-party packages. Organizations are urged to apply the available patches promptly.

Securing AI Agents with Database Access Using Token Exchange, DPoP and Row-Level Security

The article explains how to safely grant AI agents access to production databases without exposing excessive privileges. It draws on decades-old security principles such as least privilege and the confused deputy problem, now applied to LLM agents that can be tricked by prompt injection. The recommended architecture replaces persistent service-account tokens with short-lived, attenuated tokens obtained via OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange (RFC 8693) and bound to the client using DPoP (RFC 9449). Human confirmation for sensitive actions is handled through OpenID CIBA, delivering approval directly inside the chat interface. PostgreSQL Row-Level Security enforces the final authorization boundary by checking the user subject on every query. A ready-to-run demo built with issuerd and Keycloak demonstrates the full flow, including prompt-injection attempts and stolen-token attacks that are automatically rejected.

RWB Deploys Enterprise-Wide Database Access Control with Trino and Open Policy Agent

RWB has replaced fragmented manual database access processes with a centralized architecture built on Trino as the single entry point and Open Policy Agent for policy enforcement. The system enforces least-privilege access, mandatory auditing, and automated revocation tied to HR records while eliminating anonymous and password-based logins. Access requests now complete in 3–10 minutes instead of an average of four days, with 92 percent handled automatically. Key components include Keycloak for OIDC authentication, Vault for secrets, Kafka for security event streaming to SOC, and Kubernetes orchestration. Responsibility is split across AI & Data Security, Core DevOps, Access Management, SOC, and Trust & Safety teams. More than 1,250 PostgreSQL clusters and 90 projects are now connected, with real-time dashboards tracking adoption and policy health.

Klark and Klara Launch Self-Hosted Corporate Messenger and Task Manager for On-Premise Data Control

Klark and Klara are two integrated products designed to keep corporate communication and task management entirely within company infrastructure. Klark functions as a Telegram-like messenger with personal chats, supergroups, channels, voice messages, file sharing, and video calls powered by LiveKit. Klara serves as a streamlined task and knowledge base system replacing complex setups like Jira and Confluence. Both run via Docker Compose on customer servers using PostgreSQL, Redis, FastAPI, and React, with built-in antivirus scanning via ClamAV. Key security measures include mandatory TOTP two-factor authentication, LDAP integration, content security policies, and automatic session invalidation on token reuse. The combination allows direct task creation from chat messages and displays tasks alongside conversations in a unified interface.

Keycloak Cluster on Three VMs: Engineers Detail Embedded Infinispan Setup, HA Testing Failures, and Bug Fix

A team deployed Keycloak for 25,000–30,000 users across a country using three isolated VMs instead of Kubernetes. They chose Embedded Infinispan with JGroups over an external cluster to reduce failure points and maintain session replication. PostgreSQL with Patroni handled shared storage and JDBC_PING discovery. Testing revealed that full datacenter outages triggered split-brain conditions and 5xx errors that the built-in healthcheck could not resolve. The engineers wrote a Python watcher script to detect multiple coordinators in the JGROUPS_PING table and restart affected containers. They reported the recovery bug to the Keycloak project, which was confirmed and fixed in a later release. The production cluster now survives single-DC loss without session loss.

pgAdmin 4 Database Management Tool Patches Multiple Vulnerabilities in Version 9.18

The development team behind pgAdmin 4, the popular management tool for PostgreSQL databases, has released version 9.18 to address multiple security issues. The update, published on September 17, 2026, includes fixes for four CVEs along with 29 total changes covering new features and bug resolutions. One vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-86863, stems from insufficient web server authentication that trusts external HTTP headers, enabling attackers to bypass login and impersonate administrators without passwords. A second issue, CVE-2026-86864, allows command injection through the backup feature when database names are passed as arguments, potentially leading to unauthorized file writes or exfiltration of connection passwords. The update is available now from the official pgAdmin repository.

redb 4.0 Released: XML Routes, Lazy References, Unique Keys and WS-Trust Across the Ecosystem

The redb ecosystem has delivered a major simultaneous release across all core components, bringing redb.Core, redb.Route, redb.Tsak and redb.Identity to version 4.0.0. The update introduces declarative XML routing, lazy object references, unique key constraints, and a full WS-Trust SOAP facade while closing multiple security issues reported through external audits and community feedback. Seventy-six NuGet packages, seven container images and platform archives for Windows and Linux are now available, with the Pro edition remaining free and license-free throughout the 4.x line. Significant internal changes include a unified expression language, support for modern data formats such as Protobuf and Avro, and improved handling of distributed caches and OpenTelemetry metrics. Security hardening covers header sanitization in all identity facades, consent-page protections, dashboard access controls and a switch to bcrypt password hashing. Existing clusters must be stopped before upgrade because mixed versions are not supported, and large databases require a maintenance window for schema changes and partial index creation.

Data Masking: 8 Critical Questions Businesses and Developers Ask About Protecting Sensitive Data

Garda expert Dmitry Larin addresses common challenges in data masking during a recent webinar titled 'Data Masking: Battle of Opinions'. The discussion covers why masking remains essential even when encryption is deployed, how to preserve application functionality after anonymization, and the performance trade-offs of processing large databases such as 5 TB PostgreSQL instances. Different masking types including static, dynamic, selective, and streaming are explained with specific use cases for DevOps pipelines, external contractors, and BI systems. The article also examines why machine learning alone is insufficient for discovering personal data and why custom scripts fail at scale across heterogeneous environments like PostgreSQL and Oracle. Practical recommendations include combining masking with encryption, using deterministic transformations for deduplication, and separating replication from masking tasks to avoid production impact.

pg_anon Open-Source Tool Receives Major Updates for PostgreSQL Data Masking and Partial Database Operations

Tantor Labs has released version 1.11.0 of pg_anon, an open-source utility designed to mask personal data in PostgreSQL databases while preserving structure and relationships. The update introduces packaging as a standard Python package, support for partial dumps and restores using whitelist and blacklist dictionaries, and improved handling of complex schema elements such as partitioned tables, generated columns, and custom types. Performance improvements include switching the dump engine to asyncio, single-query metadata collection, and on-the-fly gzip compression to reduce memory usage on large databases. New CLI options allow clean or drop operations on target databases, privilege ignoring, and passthrough of pg_dump and pg_restore flags. A REST API was added to enable integration into CI/CD pipelines and automated self-service systems for nightly masked database refreshes. The tool helps organizations comply with data protection requirements by creating pseudonymized copies suitable for development, testing, and contractor environments.

OTUS Publishes September Digest of Free Lessons on Linux Administration, PostgreSQL, CI/CD and Infrastructure Security

OTUS has released a new digest listing free September webinars aimed at infrastructure engineers, DevOps specialists and system administrators. The program covers practical topics including Linux server configuration, PostgreSQL 18 performance tuning, high-availability clusters with Patroni, CI/CD pipelines in GitLab, eBPF observability and infrastructure security practices. All sessions are delivered by practicing OTUS instructors who share real-world production experience. Separate tracks address RAID and LVM management, GPO policies, release management in 1C environments, Go profiling, mitmproxy traffic analysis and responsible use of AI tools for incident investigation and code review. The webinars run throughout September at 19:00 or 20:00 Moscow time and require only free registration. The digest also includes sessions on career growth from tech lead to CTO and effective responsibility distribution for team leads.

Attackers Exploit Critical Sangoma Switchvox SQL Injection Flaw CVE-2026-9586 to Deploy Reverse Shells Without Credentials

A critical vulnerability in Sangoma Switchvox allows unauthenticated remote code execution through SQL injection in the /pa HTTP endpoint. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-9586 with a CVSS score of 9.3, affects internet-exposed VoIP deployments common in SMB environments. Attackers have already leveraged the issue in active campaigns since August 30, 2026, to open reverse shells and perform reconnaissance using Base64-encoded commands. The root cause is improper handling of the PhoneIP parameter in PostgreSQL queries, classified as CWE-89, which grants superuser database privileges. Sangoma released the fix in Switchvox 8.4.0.2 on July 14, 2026, following initial disclosure in April. Administrators are urged to patch immediately, restrict access, and monitor for indicators such as connections to 176.65.148.184 and suspicious entries in /var/log/switchvox/db-quirks.log.

Weekly Roundup: Next.js Leads Critical Vulnerability Reports as Chrome, Tomcat, and PostgreSQL See Major Patches

Security NEXT has published its list of the ten most-read articles for the week of August 23-29, 2026. The top story covered multiple serious vulnerabilities in Next.js that prompted an accelerated release schedule. Other high-interest items included a critical flaw in Zscaler Client Connector, several issues in Apache Tomcat rated critical, and Google’s Chrome 152 update fixing 327 vulnerabilities. Additional reports highlighted a ransomware incident at a systems development firm, flaws in SKYSEA Client View, 28 vulnerabilities fixed in PostgreSQL, and confirmed exploitation of six known flaws in SQL Server and NetScaler. The list also featured a vulnerability in the Android version of the Digital Agency’s My Number Point app and warnings about active exploitation of a WebLogic module flaw.

Deleted Database Records Remain Recoverable in SQLite Files Despite DELETE Operations

A standard DELETE query in SQLite removes rows from the table view but leaves the actual data intact inside the database file until pages are reused. The pragma secure_delete setting controls whether freed pages are zeroed immediately or simply marked as available. With the default setting of 0, strings containing names and credit card numbers can still be extracted using grep even after deletion. The same behavior appears in PostgreSQL through dead row versions until VACUUM runs and in MySQL InnoDB through undo logs and the binary log. The issue directly affects compliance with personal data deletion requests because backups, replicas, and analytics exports often retain the original records. Proper mitigation requires enabling secure_delete, running VACUUM after bulk deletions, or encrypting sensitive fields with per-record keys that can be destroyed on request.

Bitrix24 Releases Fully On-Premise BI Constructor for Regulated Enterprises

Bitrix24 has introduced a new delivery model for its BI Constructor that allows complete deployment inside a customer's own infrastructure. The update eliminates any requirement for external servers, cloud APIs, or internet connectivity, ensuring that all corporate data remains within the organization's closed perimeter. Previously, even the boxed version of the platform needed access to external infrastructure for updates and auxiliary services, creating conflicts with internal security policies and regulatory demands in highly regulated sectors. The new on-premise variant performs all data processing and storage exclusively on customer servers, giving organizations full control over access rights, backups, updates, and integration with internal protection tools. The solution is compatible with the boxed edition of Bitrix24 running on PostgreSQL and does not connect to external CDNs or cloud services. Bitrix24 expects strong interest from large enterprises and organizations handling restricted-access data that must stay inside the corporate network. Pilot implementations have already been completed, with broader customer pilots planned in the coming months.

PostgreSQL Releases Security Update Fixing 28 Vulnerabilities and Over 110 Bugs

The PostgreSQL development team issued a major security update on August 13, 2026, addressing 28 vulnerabilities along with more than 110 bugs. While no issues reached a CVSSv3.1 base score of 9.0 or higher, 18 vulnerabilities scored 7.0 or above, with 14 rated at 8.8. Several flaws enable arbitrary code execution, including heap buffer overflows in regular expression processing and the to_char function. Additional fixes cover heap buffer overflows in pg_stat_statements and pg_dump, type confusion issues, and an SQL injection vulnerability. The update resolves specific CVEs such as CVE-2026-14664, CVE-2026-14669, CVE-2026-14670, CVE-2026-16238, CVE-2026-16239, and CVE-2026-15741.

pgAdmin 4 Issues Critical Security Update Addressing Seven Vulnerabilities Including Prior Patch Failures

The pgAdmin 4 development team has released version 9.17 to resolve seven vulnerabilities in the popular PostgreSQL database management tool. The update covers two newly discovered issues rated Critical, one Critical flaw stemming from incomplete remediation in the previous 9.16 release, and four additional vulnerabilities. Among the new flaws is CVE-2026-17566, an OS command injection vulnerability in the query-based data export feature caused by insufficient SQL validation. Another Critical issue, CVE-2026-17349, allows duplication of shared servers to inadvertently copy stored database credentials belonging to other users. The incomplete fix for CVE-2026-12045 led to CVE-2026-17351, which bypasses the read-only restrictions of the AI Assistant due to differing string literal interpretations between the SQL parsing library and PostgreSQL.

Dell Releases Security Update for PowerProtect Data Manager Fixing 359 Vulnerabilities

Dell has issued a security update for its data protection solution Dell PowerProtect Data Manager to address a total of 359 vulnerabilities. The company published security advisory DSA-2026-287 on July 14, 2026, rating the issues as Critical and urging users to apply the fixes immediately. Six product-specific flaws were resolved, including CVE-2026-40712 in the REST API that allows privilege escalation after input validation bypass and CVE-2026-49499 stemming from improper security token generation. The remaining four native vulnerabilities received CVSS v3.1 base scores between 6.0 and 7.2. In addition, 353 third-party component vulnerabilities were patched, covering 130 issues in the Linux kernel along with flaws in Apache Log4j, Apache Tomcat, Samba, PostgreSQL, OpenSSL, glibc, and Vim. Administrators are advised to upgrade to version 20.2.0.0 or later to mitigate the risks.

OTUS Publishes Extensive Digest Covering Kubernetes, GitLab CI, DevSecOps and Infrastructure Reliability

OTUS has released a large-scale digest that compiles free lessons, practical articles and advanced courses focused on real-world infrastructure challenges. The collection addresses interconnected topics including Kubernetes container orchestration, GitLab CI pipeline automation, observability with OpenTelemetry, network troubleshooting, and DevSecOps practices. Readers can explore specific lessons on secrets management with Vault, load testing, RAID recovery, and kernel-level protections in Linux. The digest also features in-depth articles on Docker Compose configuration, CrowdSec migration, L2 network loops, and self-service deployment models. For experienced professionals, OTUS offers specialized courses on high-load systems, PostgreSQL administration, Linux kernel development, and advanced networking with BGP and OSPF.