Where
AND
-Infinity
0
Severity
4.8
XSS, CSRF
AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N

HTML injection in pgAdmin 4's cloud deployment module. The verifycredentials, deploy, regions, and update-server endpoints under /rds/, /azure/, /google/, and the top-level /cloud/ blueprint propagated AWS / Azure / Google SDK exception text — and the related file-resolution and database-commit exception text — into the JSON response body (the info and errormsg fields) without HTML-encoding. The Cloud Wizard frontend rendered these strings through html-react-parser, so an attacker-influenced exception message embedded structural HTML directly into the wizard's DOM.

The reported entry point is /rds/verifycredentials/. An authenticated pgAdmin user submits a crafted accesskey whose value contains an <iframe/src=...> payload; AWS STS rejects the credential with an IncompleteSignature exception whose text quotes the accesskey verbatim; the pgAdmin backend forwards that text into the JSON info field; the Cloud Wizard's FormFooterMessage parses it as HTML. The browser fetches the iframe's src from an attacker-controlled host, and JavaScript executing inside the cross-origin iframe writes to parent.location, redirecting the victim's pgAdmin tab. Because the injection renders inside pgAdmin's own interface, X-Frame-Options and Content-Security-Policy frame-ancestors do not mitigate it. Baseline impact is self-targeted (the same user who supplied the payload sees the injection); escalation against other authenticated users requires an additional cross-site request-forgery primitive capable of submitting the malformed credential request with a valid X-pgA-CSRFToken in the victim's browser context.

The same unsanitised-error-into-JSON pattern was present across multiple sibling endpoints — Azure's checkclusternameavailability, every Google endpoint that surfaces SDK errors (verificationack, projects, regions, instancetypes, databaseversions, the verifycredentials path-resolution branches), the central /deploy endpoint that bubbles str(e) from deployonrds / deployonazure / deployongoogle, and updatecloudserver which surfaces the str(e) from a failing db.session.commit — all of which are now covered.

Fix HTML-escapes every external/SDK exception string at the endpoint sink via a new shared sanitizeexternaltext helper (HTML escape with control-character strip), promoted out of the psycopg3 driver into web/pgadmin/utils/textsanitize.py. The Cloud Wizard frontend additionally renders its FormFooterMessage in plain-text mode for backend-derived strings, so the value is never parsed as HTML even if a future sink forgets the escape.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: from 6.6 before 9.16.

First published (updated )

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