---
title: "Collaboration makes us all stronger"
description: "An external researcher, Mehmet Ince, reported a memory-safety flaw in PostGIS’s address_standardizer extension, where caller-controlled grammar data indexed a fixed-size array without bounds checking. Because the extension was available to ordinary tenant roles on managed Postgres services, Databricks treated the issue as a platform exposure rather than a third-party problem, while noting that its microVM architecture meant the exploit did not produce cross-customer impact on Lakebase Postgres and Neon. Detection alerted the Neon team during testing, enabling rapid validation and downstream patching while a durable fix was developed and deployed to protect tenants without customer action. The upstream fix initially missed cases; Mehmet supplied the remaining pieces, and the complete correction was returned to PostGIS, with his bounty donated and matched for the project."
---

# Collaboration makes us all stronger

[Databricks](https://yomu.fyi/company/databricks) · Aaron Kobayashi, Mehmet D. Ince, Anurag Srivastava, Alexey Kondratov · Sep 1, 2026

**Type:** Incident / postmortem

## Summary

An external researcher, Mehmet Ince, reported a memory-safety flaw in PostGIS’s address\_standardizer extension, where caller-controlled grammar data indexed a fixed-size array without bounds checking. Because the extension was available to ordinary tenant roles on managed Postgres services, Databricks treated the issue as a platform exposure rather than a third-party problem, while noting that its microVM architecture meant the exploit did not produce cross-customer impact on Lakebase Postgres and Neon. Detection alerted the Neon team during testing, enabling rapid validation and downstream patching while a durable fix was developed and deployed to protect tenants without customer action. The upstream fix initially missed cases; Mehmet supplied the remaining pieces, and the complete correction was returned to PostGIS, with his bounty donated and matched for the project.

## Context

A researcher found a memory-safety vulnerability in the widely deployed PostGIS address\_standardizer extension. The vulnerable code path was reachable by an ordinary tenant role because customers could install and use the extension without special privileges, creating exposure for managed Postgres platforms.

## Approach / What changed

Databricks validated the report against Neon’s PostGIS version, patched its downstream extension builds independently of the upstream release timeline, and deployed a hardened fix to Neon and Lakebase tenants. Mehmet then submitted missing cases to PostGIS so the root cause was fixed for the broader open-source ecosystem.

## Takeaways

- The vulnerability came from using caller-controlled grammar data to index a fixed-size internal array without a bounds check, creating an out-of-bounds memory access.
- Databricks treated vulnerabilities in an open-source component exposed to its tenants as its own platform responsibility and used downstream patching to protect customers before an upstream release.
- The initial upstream fix did not cover every case; Mehmet supplied the remaining corrections, while donating and matching his bounty to support the PostGIS project.

**Tags:** [Bug Bounty](https://yomu.fyi/topic/bug-bounty), [PostGIS](https://yomu.fyi/topic/postgis), [Postgres](https://yomu.fyi/topic/postgres), [Security](https://yomu.fyi/topic/security)

- Source: [Databricks](https://www.databricks.com/blog/collaboration-makes-us-all-stronger)
- Source URL: https://www.databricks.com/blog/collaboration-makes-us-all-stronger
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-01T20:00:52.759Z

[Read original post](https://www.databricks.com/blog/collaboration-makes-us-all-stronger)