pgAdmin <= 8.3 is affected by a path-traversal vulnerability while deserializing users’ sessions in the session handling code. If the server is running on Windows, an unauthenticated attacker can load and deserialize remote pickle objects and gain code execution. If the server is running on POSIX/Linux, an authenticated attacker can upload pickle objects, deserialize them, and gain code execution.

Remote Code Execution security vulnerability in pgAdmin 4 (Query Tool and Cloud Deployment modules).

The vulnerability is associated with the 2 POST endpoints; /sqleditor/querytool/download, where the querycommited parameter and /cloud/deploy endpoint, where the highavailability parameter is unsafely passed to the Python eval() function, allowing arbitrary code execution.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: before 9.2.

pgAdmin versions 8.11 and earlier are vulnerable to a security flaw in OAuth2 authentication. This vulnerability allows an attacker to potentially obtain the client ID and secret, leading to unauthorized access to user data.

pgAdmin <= 8.4 is affected by a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability through the validate binary path API. This vulnerability allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on the server hosting PGAdmin, posing a severe risk to the database management system's integrity and the security of the underlying data.

pgAdmin versions up to 9.9 are affected by a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability that occurs when running in server mode and performing restores from PLAIN-format dump files. This issue allows attackers to inject and execute arbitrary commands on the server hosting pgAdmin, posing a critical risk to the integrity and security of the database management system and underlying data.

Two state-mutating endpoints in pgAdmin 4's SQL Editor blueprint -- DELETE /sqleditor/close/<transid> and POST /sqleditor/initialize/sqleditor/updateconnection/<sgid>/<sid>/<did> -- were the only routes in the module missing the @pgaloginrequired decorator. Both reach a pickle.loads sink on session['gridData'][<transid>]['commandobj']: the close endpoint via closesqleditorsession(), and updatesqleditorconnection via checktransactionstatus(). In server mode these endpoints were reachable without any authenticated pgAdmin session.

The defect is a missing-authentication-on-critical-function (CWE-306) wrapper around a deserialization-of-untrusted-data sink (CWE-502). Exploiting it for remote code execution requires the attacker to also forge a server-side session file whose gridData entry contains a malicious pickle payload, which in turn requires both (a) knowledge of pgAdmin's Flask SECRETKEY (no chain to leak it is described here -- the attacker must already possess it) and (b) write access to pgAdmin's sessions/ directory on the host. Neither precondition is granted by this defect on its own. When those preconditions are met from another channel (misconfigured deployment, prior compromise, leaked configuration), the missing auth gate is the final hop that turns an existing partial compromise into unauthenticated code execution in the pgAdmin process -- and, by extension, on the host under whatever account runs pgAdmin.

Fix is a one-line @pgaloginrequired decorator on each of the two endpoints, matching the convention used by every other route in the module. The isauthenticated / MFA chain now runs before the transid is dereferenced, so an unauthenticated request is rejected before reaching the deserialization path.

The defect is server-mode only. In DESKTOP mode pgAdmin's beforerequest hook re-authenticates DESKTOPUSER on every request, so no endpoint can be exercised in an unauthenticated state and no auth decorator (or its absence) is meaningful. The accompanying regression test mirrors the attacker's path -- harvests an X-pgA-CSRFToken from GET /login and replays it against both endpoints -- and self-skips outside server mode for that reason; it is wired into the existing server-mode CI workflow alongside the data-isolation tests.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: from 6.9 before 9.16.

Authorization vulnerability in pgAdmin 4 server mode affecting Server Groups, Servers, Shared Servers, Background Processes, and Debugger modules.

Multiple endpoints fetched user-owned objects without filtering by the requesting user's identity. An authenticated user could access another user's private servers, server groups, background processes, and debugger function arguments by guessing object IDs.

Additionally, the Shared Servers feature contained multiple issues including credential leakage (passexeccmd, passfile, SSL keys), privilege escalation via writable passexeccmd (a shell command executed when establishing the connection) allowing arbitrary command execution in the owner's process context, and owner-data corruption via SQLAlchemy session mutations. Several owner-only fields (passexeccmd, passexecexpiration, dbres, dbrestype) were writable by non-owners through the API, and additional fields (kerberosconn, tags, postconnectionsql) lacked per-user persistence so non-owner edits mutated the owner's record.

Fix centralises access control via a new serveraccess module, scopes all user-owned models with a UserScopedMixin, returns HTTP 410 from connectionmanager when access is denied in server mode, suppresses owner-only fields for non-owners across the merge / API response / ServerManager paths, and adds an explicit owner-only write guard. The remediation landed in two pull requests; both are referenced.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: before 9.15.

Read-only transaction bypass in the pgAdmin 4 AI Assistant allows an attacker who can influence database content that the assistant reads to execute arbitrary SQL with the privileges of the pgAdmin user's database role.

The AI Assistant's executesqlquery tool runs LLM-generated SQL inside a BEGIN TRANSACTION READ ONLY wrapper to prevent data modification. The LLM-supplied query was forwarded to the database driver without restriction to a single statement or to read-only verbs, so a multi-statement payload beginning with COMMIT, END, ROLLBACK, or ABORT terminated the read-only transaction and ran subsequent statements in autocommit mode. The trailing ROLLBACK then had no effect.

Delivery is via prompt injection: an attacker who can write content into any object the AI Assistant may inspect (a row, a column value, a comment) can cause the LLM to emit the multi-statement payload as a tool call. With ordinary write privileges on the pgAdmin user's role the attacker can perform unauthorised data modification. When the pgAdmin user's role is a PostgreSQL superuser or holds pgexecuteserverprogram, the chain extends to remote code execution on the database server host via COPY ... TO PROGRAM.

Fix validates the LLM-supplied query up front: it must parse to exactly one non-empty / non-comment statement whose leading real token (after stripping whitespace, comments, and punctuation) is one of SELECT, WITH, EXPLAIN, SHOW, VALUES, or TABLE. Transaction-control verbs, DML, DDL, CALL, COPY, DO, SET/RESET, and everything else are rejected before any database work happens. PostgreSQL's READ ONLY mode continues to backstop data-modifying CTEs, EXPLAIN ANALYZE on writes, and volatile side effects.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: from 9.13 before 9.16.

The fix for CVE-2026-12045 in pgAdmin 4 9.16 required the LLM-supplied query passed to the AI Assistant's executesqlquery tool to parse, via sqlparse, as exactly one non-transaction-control statement before running it inside a BEGIN TRANSACTION READ ONLY wrapper. sqlparse's string-literal lexing can disagree with PostgreSQL's own parser: under standardconformingstrings = on (PostgreSQL's default since 9.1), a backslash immediately before a quote is an ordinary character to PostgreSQL, but sqlparse treats it as escaping the quote. A payload such as SELECT '\';COMMIT;CREATE TABLE pwn(x int);SELECT 1 --' therefore parses as a single SELECT to sqlparse's validator, while PostgreSQL executes it as four statements: the smuggled COMMIT ends the wrapping read-only transaction, and the trailing ROLLBACK becomes a no-op. This reintroduces the same write/RCE bypass CVE-2026-12045 was meant to close, reachable via the same indirect prompt-injection delivery (an attacker plants the payload in any object the AI Assistant may read; the LLM emits it as a tool call).

An initial candidate fix ran the query with psycopg's execute(..., prepare=True), intending to force PostgreSQL's own Parse step (extended query protocol) to reject multi-statement text regardless of sqlparse's classification. This candidate fix does not work as submitted: psycopg3's PrepareManager silently ignores the prepare argument whenever the connection's preparethreshold is None, which is pgAdmin's default for every server connection (the per-server "Prepare threshold" field is blank unless an administrator explicitly sets it) -- psycopg3 falls back to the simple query protocol, the same multi-statement-capable path the bypass exploits, so the candidate fix closes nothing on any real-world default configuration.

The corrected fix sets conn.preparethreshold = 0 directly on the dedicated, single-use read-only connection the AI Assistant tool opens, structurally forcing the extended query protocol independent of any server-level configuration. Verified against a live PostgreSQL 18 instance: the payload executes successfully under the preparethreshold=None (default) behavior, and is rejected with "cannot insert multiple commands into a prepared statement" once preparethreshold=0 is set on that connection.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: from 9.13 before 9.17.

pgAdmin 4's Import/Export Data tool builds a psql \copy (...) command line by interpolating a user-supplied SQL query into a Jinja template and passing the rendered line to psql via --command. To stop an attacker from breaking out of the (...) wrapper, createimportexportjob() (route POST /importexport/job/<sid>, gated only by the ordinary, commonly-granted toolsimportexportdata permission) validated the query with a hand-written parenthesis-balance checker, isqueryparensbalanced(). That checker always treated a backslash before a single quote (\') as escaping the quote, i.e. as if standardconformingstrings were off. PostgreSQL has defaulted standardconformingstrings to on since 9.1 (2010), the default on every PostgreSQL version pgAdmin 4 currently supports (13-18); under that default psql's own \copy tokenizer treats \ as an ordinary character, so a single quote immediately after it closes the string literal. A query such as SELECT 'a\') TO PROGRAM 'echo pwned' x' was therefore accepted as "balanced" by pgAdmin's checker (which believed the ) was still inside the string), while psql, run through the actual rendered command line, closes the string at that point and treats the following ) as the end of the wrapping \copy (...) subquery, exposing an attacker-chosen TO PROGRAM '<command>' clause that psql executes via popen() -- independent of a subsequent syntax error later on the same line. This is the same class of bug as CVE-2025-12762/CVE-2025-13780 (RCE via psql meta-command/COPY injection during PLAIN-format dump restore), reached through an independently written defense in a different module (Import/Export Data rather than Restore) that had its own, different logic bug (inverted backslash-escape semantics rather than a BOM-defeated regex anchor).

The fix rejects any backslash inside a single-quoted string in the query outright, rather than picking one of the two possible psql interpretations. This is intentionally conservative: because the correct interpretation of \ depends on the target server's standardconformingstrings setting, which the checker cannot reliably know at validation time, refusing the query is safer than guessing.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: from the introduction of isqueryparensbalanced() before 9.18.

Stored cross-site scripting in pgAdmin 4's error-rendering and plan-node-rendering paths. Text returned by a PostgreSQL server (ErrorResponse messages, including object names quoted back inside relation-does-not-exist errors and inside EXPLAIN Recheck Cond / Exact Heap Blocks fields) was passed verbatim through html-react-parser at every user-facing sink — the notifier toasts, FormFooterMessage / FormInput help and error areas, FormNote, ModalProvider AlertContent and confirmDelete, ToolErrorView, the Explain visualiser's NodeText panel, the SQL editor confirm dialogs, ConfirmSaveContent, PreferencesHelper modal alerts, and SelectThemes helper text. A PostgreSQL server an attacker controls — or any server returning attacker-influenced text such as a table or column name a low-privilege database user can create — could inject arbitrary HTML (including <iframe>) into the pgAdmin DOM the moment the victim's pgAdmin connected to that server or viewed an Explain plan that referenced the crafted object.

The injected iframe's srcdoc could fetch attacker-served JavaScript and, by writing to parent.location, redirect the victim's top-level pgAdmin browser tab to an attacker-controlled URL. Because the injection originates from inside pgAdmin's own interface, standard anti-clickjacking controls (X-Frame-Options, Content-Security-Policy: frame-ancestors) do not mitigate it. A phishing page rendered inside the legitimate pgAdmin window is indistinguishable from a genuine pgAdmin dialog.

Fix combines three complementary layers. (1) DOMPurify sanitisation is wrapped around every html-react-parser call site reachable from notifier, alert, form-error, Explain, and SQL-editor flows. (2) A new plain-text rendering contract — SafeMessage / SafeHtmlMessage components plus Notifier.errorText / alertText / warningText / infoText / successText helpers — is introduced; around fifty callers across browser, tools, dashboard, debugger, misc, llm, preferences, schema diff, and the SQL editor that previously interpolated backend-derived strings are migrated to the plain-text variants. (3) Backend HTML-escape is applied at the post-connection-SQL handler (executepostconnectionsql) via a new sanitizeexternaltext helper, so third-party JSON consumers (audit logs, API clients) never receive raw markup either; the Explain plan-info renderer is also patched to .escape Recheck Cond and Exact Heap Blocks at construction (matching every sibling field), giving defence in depth even before DOMPurify runs.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: from 6.0 before 9.16.

/misc/workspace/adhocconnectserver, part of the Workspaces feature introduced in pgAdmin 4 9.0, when passed the id of an existing server, clones that server via Server.clone(), which copies every column from the source row, including userid, shared, sharedusername, and the stored credential fields password, savepassword, and tunnelpassword. When a non-owner triggered an adhoc connect against another user's (in practice, typically an administrator's) shared server, the clone inherited that user's ownership, shared flag, and stored database credentials verbatim. pgAdmin persisted this cross-tenant, credential-bearing server row before the connection was even attempted, so it survived even when the connection subsequently failed. The non-owner could then open the newly-owned clone and pgAdmin would connect using the source user's stored database password on the non-owner's behalf, granting the non-owner use of database credentials -- and whatever database privileges they confer -- that were never their own.

Fix forces the cloned adhoc record's ownership fields (userid, shared, sharedusername) and stored credential fields (password, savepassword, tunnelpassword) to belong to the calling user and be cleared/private before committing, regardless of the source server's ownership, sharing state, or stored credentials. A regression test asserts that an adhoc connect triggered by a non-owner against another user's shared server persists a row owned by the caller, not shared, and without the source's stored credentials.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: from 9.0 before 9.17.

pgAdmin <= 9.1 is affected by a security vulnerability with Cross-Site Scripting(XSS). If attackers execute any arbitrary HTML/JavaScript in a user's browser through query result rendering, then HTML/JavaScript runs on the browser.

pgAdmin versions up to 9.10 are affected by a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability that occurs when running in server mode and performing restores from PLAIN-format dump files. This issue allows attackers to inject and execute arbitrary commands on the server hosting pgAdmin, posing a critical risk to the integrity and security of the database management system and underlying data.

pgAdmin <= 8.5 is affected by a multi-factor authentication bypass vulnerability. This vulnerability allows an attacker with knowledge of a legitimate account’s username and password may authenticate to the application and perform sensitive actions within the application, such as managing files and executing SQL queries, regardless of the account’s MFA enrollment status.

pgAdmin 4 versions up to 9.9 are affected by a command injection vulnerability on Windows systems. This issue is caused by the use of shell=True during backup and restore operations, enabling attackers to execute arbitrary system commands by providing specially crafted file path input.

A flaw was found in pgAdmin. This issue occurs when the pgAdmin server HTTP API validates the path a user selects to external PostgreSQL utilities such as pgdump and pgrestore. Versions of pgAdmin prior to 7.6 failed to properly control the server code executed on this API, allowing an authenticated user to run arbitrary commands on the server.

The pgAdmin server includes an HTTP API that is intended to be used to validate the path a user selects to external PostgreSQL utilities such as pgdump and pgrestore. The utility is executed by the server to determine what PostgreSQL version it is from. Versions of pgAdmin prior to 6.17 failed to properly secure this API, which could allow an unauthenticated user to call it with a path of their choosing, such as a UNC path to a server they control on a Windows machine. This would cause an appropriately named executable in the target path to be executed by the pgAdmin server.

OS command injection (CWE-78) vulnerability in pgAdmin 4 Import/Export query export.

User-supplied input was interpolated directly into a psql \copy metacommand template without sanitization. An authenticated user could inject ") TO PROGRAM 'cmd'" to break out of the \copy (...) context and achieve arbitrary command execution on the pgAdmin server, or ") TO '/path'" for arbitrary file write. Additional fields (format, onerror, logverbosity) were also raw-interpolated and exploitable.

Fix adds a parens-balance parser modeled on psql's strtokx tokenizer, allow-lists format/onerror/logverbosity, rejects null bytes in the query, and tightens type and gating checks.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: before 9.15.

SQL injection vulnerability in pgAdmin 4 Maintenance Tool.

Four user-supplied JSON fields (bufferusagelimit, vacuumparallel, vacuumindexcleanup, reindextablespace) were concatenated directly into the rendered VACUUM/ANALYZE/REINDEX command and passed to psql --command. An authenticated user with the toolsmaintenance permission could break out of the option syntax and execute arbitrary SQL on the connected PostgreSQL server. The injected SQL could in turn invoke COPY ... TO PROGRAM to escalate to operating-system command execution on the database host.

Fix introduces server-side allow-listing of all four fields and switches reindextablespace from manual quoting to the qtIdent filter.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: before 9.15.

SQL injection in pgAdmin 4 across every dialog template that renders COMMENT ON ... IS '<description>' for a user-supplied description field. The Jinja templates for Domains (and their constraints), Foreign Tables, Languages, and Event Triggers, plus the Views OID-lookup query, interpolated the description directly inside a single-quoted SQL literal -- '{{ data.description }}' -- instead of passing it through the qtLiteral escape filter. An authenticated pgAdmin user with permission to create or alter the affected object types could submit a description containing an apostrophe, break out of the literal and chain arbitrary SQL. The injected SQL runs under the PostgreSQL role the user is already authenticated as; for a connected role with COPY ... TO/FROM PROGRAM (typically PostgreSQL superuser), this chains to OS command execution on the PostgreSQL host. The defect does not cross a privilege boundary -- the user already has direct SQL access to that role through pgAdmin's Query Tool -- so the attacker gains no capability beyond what their database role already grants. The marginal impact captures bypass of any application-layer Query Tool gating an operator may have configured.

The defect was originally reported against the Domain Dialog description field; a code-wide audit identified sixteen sites of the same pattern across the templates listed above. The same review also surfaced ten related sinks in the pgstattuple/pgstatindex stats templates -- pgstattuple('{{schema}}.{{table}}') and the matching pgstatindex shape -- where qtIdent escapes embedded double quotes inside the identifier but not apostrophes, so a user with CREATE privilege on a schema could plant a table or index named foo'bar and a later stats viewer would render an unbalanced literal.

Fix is layered:

1. Sites: replace every '{{ x.description }}' with {{ x.description|qtLiteral(conn) }} (no surrounding quotes -- the filter wraps the value in escaped quotes itself). Plumb conn=self.conn through every rendertemplate call that loads one of these templates. Also corrects a { % elif Jinja typo in the foreign-table schema diff (dead branch). Rewrite the ten pgstattuple/pgstatindex stats sites to address the relation via OID + ::oid::regclass cast (e.g. pgstattuple({{ tid }}::oid::regclass)), eliminating the embedded literal-call form entirely so that bug-class can no longer recur there.

2. Driver hardening: qtLiteral (in utils/driver/psycopg3/init.py) used to silently return the raw unescaped value when its conn argument was falsy. It now raises ValueError -- surfacing the entire bug class going forward. The change immediately uncovered eight latent plumbing bugs (in schemas/init.py, schemas/functions/init.py, schemas/tables/utils.py, foreignservers/init.py, and seven sites in roles/init.py) -- all fixed as part of this patch. The inner except block that swallowed adapter-level failures and returned the raw value is also removed, so unadaptable inputs raise instead of leaking unescaped values.

3. Regression tests: a per-template behavioural test renders each previously-vulnerable template with an apostrophe-injection payload and asserts the escaped fragment is present and the vulnerable fragment absent; a lint test walks every .sql template flagging any '{{ ... }}' single-quote-wrapped interpolation against an explicit allowlist; unit tests cover the new qtLiteral fail-fast and inner-except raise paths.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: from 1.0 before 9.16.

The fix for CVE-2026-12044 in pgAdmin 4 9.16 hardened qtLiteral and switched sixteen COMMENT ON / pgstattuple / pgstatindex templates to it, but missed several sinks that had been placed in testsqlstringliterallint.py's ALLOWLIST on the incorrect assumption that schema, table, publication, and subscription names sourced from pgcatalog via the browser tree could never contain an apostrophe. PostgreSQL permits arbitrary characters in quoted identifiers, so a low-privileged user able to CREATE TABLE, CREATE PUBLICATION, or CREATE SUBSCRIPTION can plant an apostrophe'd object name that breaks out of the unescaped '{{ name }}' template interpolation the moment any user (including a higher-privileged one) opens that object's Statistics or Dependencies tab, allowing arbitrary SQL statement injection in the viewing user's database session.

Affected sinks: the Index Statistics query for all-indexes listing (collstats.sql, both the 16plus and default PostgreSQL-version template variants -- distinct from the single-index stats.sql path already fixed in CVE-2026-12044), and the publication and subscription dependencies.sql / getposition.sql templates (both the pg and ppas/EPAS dialect variants for publications).

Fix switches all of these templates to qtLiteral(conn) for name interpolation, and updates publications/init.py and subscriptions/init.py to pass conn=self.conn into the dependencies.sql rendertemplate call so the qtLiteral filter has a connection to quote against. The corresponding ALLOWLIST entries in testsqlstringliterallint.py are removed now that these sinks are properly escaped rather than merely assumed safe. A behavioral regression test renders each fixed template with a stacked-statement apostrophe payload and asserts both that the object name appears exactly as qtLiteral-escaped and that the rendered SQL parses as exactly one statement, verifying the assertion genuinely fails against the pre-patch raw-interpolation form.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: the Index Statistics sink from 1.0, and the Publications/Subscriptions sinks from 5.0, both before 9.17.

A vulnerability was found in pgadmin, where users logging into pgAdmin running in server mode using LDAP authentication may be attached to another user's session if multiple connection attempts occur simultaneously.

pgAdmin <= 9.7 is affected by a Cross-Origin Opener Policy (COOP) vulnerability. This vulnerability allows an attacker to manipulate the OAuth flow, potentially leading to unauthorised account access, account takeover, data breaches, and privilege escalation.

The MASTERPASSWORDHOOK setting, introduced in pgAdmin 4 7.2, lets an administrator configure an external command that returns a per-user encryption key, with %u in the configured string replaced by the current user's name. The previous implementation substituted the username directly into the command string and executed the result with subprocess.Popen(..., shell=True). Because the username can originate from an external authentication source (OAuth/OIDC claims, Kerberos, webserver auth) rather than a value pgAdmin fully controls, a username containing shell metacharacters (';', '$()', backticks, pipes, '&&', newlines) allowed an authenticated user to execute arbitrary commands as the pgAdmin service account in any deployment where the configured hook string uses %u.

Fix tokenises the trusted, administrator-configured hook string into an argument vector first (using shlex in POSIX-quoting mode, with backslash-escaping disabled so Windows-style paths are not mis-parsed), substitutes the untrusted username into the individual argv elements, and executes with shell=False. The username is therefore always confined to a single argv element; any shell metacharacters it contains are inert. Administrators whose MASTERPASSWORDHOOK previously relied on shell features (pipes, redirection, environment-variable expansion, globbing) within the hook string itself must move that logic into the invoked script, since it is no longer interpreted by a shell.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: from 7.2 before 9.17.

pgAdmin <= 9.9  is affected by a vulnerability in the LDAP authentication mechanism allows bypassing TLS certificate verification.

pgAdmin <= 9.9  is affected by an LDAP injection vulnerability in the LDAP authentication flow that allows an attacker to inject special LDAP characters in the username, causing the DC/LDAP server and the client to process an unusual amount of data DOS.

pgAdmin <= 8.5 is affected by XSS vulnerability in /settings/store API response json payload. This vulnerability allows attackers to execute malicious script at the client end.

pgAdmin <= 8.8 has an installation Directory permission issue. Because of this issue, attackers can gain unauthorised access to the installation directory on the Debian or RHEL 8 platforms.

pgAdmin versions 9.11 are affected by a Restore restriction bypass via key disclosure vulnerability that occurs when running in server mode and performing restores from PLAIN-format dump files. An attacker with access to the pgAdmin web interface can observe an active restore operation, extract the \restrict key in real time, and race the restore process by overwriting the restore script with a payload that re-enables meta-commands using \unrestrict <key>. This results in reliable command execution on the pgAdmin host during the restore operation.