Breaking

Sunday, April 4, 2021

Python 3.9.4 hotfix is now available

Python 3.9.3 was released two days ago on Friday, April 2nd. It
contains important security content listed below for reference.
Unfortunately, it also introduced an unintentional ABI incompatibility,
making some C extensions built with Python 3.9.0 - 3.9.2 crash with
Python 3.9.3 on 32-bit systems. To minimize disruption, I decided to
recall 3.9.3 and introduce this hotfix release: 3.9.4.


We highly recommend upgrading your Python 3.9 installations to 3.9.4 at your earliest convenience.


Get it here:

https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-394/

What is “ABI compatibility”?


Python guarantees that within a given language series (like the
current 3.9) binary extensions written in C or C++ and compiled against headers of one release
(like 3.9.0) will be importable from other versions in the same series
(like 3.9.3). If this weren’t the case, library authors would have to
ship separate binary wheels on PyPI for every single bugfix release of
Python. That would be very inconvenient.



What broke in Python 3.9.3?


In a fix for a corner-case crash around recursion limits and exceptions, the PyThreadState struct needed to change. While PyThreadState’s only documented public member is the *interp field, it’s not uncommon for C extensions to access other fields in this struct as well.


When I approved the backport of this fix, I missed the fact that the
variable size change would change the memory layout of said struct on
32-bit systems (on 64-bit systems alignment rules made the size change
backwards compatible). Merging the backport was a mistake, and so 3.9.4
reverts it to restore compatibility with binary extensions built against Python 3.9.0 - 3.9.2. Details in bpo-43710.



Security Content in Python 3.9.3



  • bpo-43631:
    high-severity CVE-2021-3449 and CVE-2021-3450 were published for
    OpenSSL, it’s been upgraded to 1.1.1k in CI, and macOS and Windows
    installers.

  • bpo-42988:
    CVE-2021-3426: Remove the getfile feature of the pydoc module which
    could be abused to read arbitrary files on the disk (directory traversal
    vulnerability). Moreover, even source code of Python modules can
    contain sensitive data like passwords. Vulnerability reported by David
    Schwörer.

  • bpo-43285: ftplib no
    longer trusts the IP address value returned from the server in response
    to the PASV command by default. This prevents a malicious FTP server
    from using the response to probe IPv4 address and port combinations on
    the client network. Code that requires the former vulnerable behavior
    may set a trust_server_pasv_ipv4_address attribute on their ftplib.FTP
    instances to True to re-enable it.

  • bpo-43439: Add audit hooks for gc.get_objects(), gc.get_referrers() and gc.get_referents(). Patch by Pablo Galindo.


Release Calendar


Maintenance releases for the 3.9 series will continue at regular bi-monthly intervals, with 3.9.5 planned for May 3rd 2021 as well.



What’s new?


The Python 3.9 series contains many new features and optimizations over 3.8. See the “What’s New in Python 3.9 ” document for more information about features included in the 3.9 series. We also have a detailed change log for 3.9.3 specifically.


Detailed information about all changes made in version 3.8.9 can be found in its respective changelog.



We hope you enjoy those new releases!


Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development
and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by
volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the
Python Software Foundation.


Your friendly release team,
Łukasz Langa @ambv
Ned Deily @nad

Steve Dower @steve.dower
 

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