CVE-2026-17347: pgAdmin 4 · OS Command Injection
Affects pgAdmin 4Source CVE Database V5
Not known to be exploited · CVSS 7.5 High : upgrade to 9.17 soon.
Data as of 30 Oct 2026, 06:59 UTC
- EPSS
- 0.7% chance of exploitation in 30 days – higher than 53% of CVEsExploit Prediction Scoring System: the likelihood attackers will use this flaw soon.
- Patch
- Available – fixed in 9.17
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:HExploitation evidence
Disclosed: evidence found.
CVE published 31 Jul 2026
Detectable: no evidence on record.
No public nuclei template indexed
Weaponized: no evidence on record.
No public exploit code indexed in Metasploit or Exploit-DB
Exploited in the wildExploited: no evidence on record.
Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation
Observed by OffSeq MirageSeen by Mirage: no evidence on record.
No attack traffic recorded by OffSeq Mirage sensors
A missing step is not evidence of safety. Sources: cve.org (opens in a new tab), the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 29 Oct 2026.
What to do
Upgrade pgAdmin 4 to 9.17.
Affected software
| Product | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| pgadmin.orgpgAdmin 4 | Affected
| Fixed in
|
GitHubpgAdmin 4pkg:github/pgAdmin 4Other threats | Affected
| Fixed in
|
Check your own hosts for these packages with threat-finder (opens in a new tab), our free open-source scanner.
AI-suggested
The vulnerability is fixed by changing the command execution method to use argument vector tokenization and shell=False, preventing shell metacharacters in usernames from being interpreted. Administrators should upgrade to pgAdmin 4 version 9.17 or later when available. Until then, avoid using untrusted usernames in shell commands or modify the MASTER_PASSWORD_HOOK to not rely on shell features. Review and adapt any hook scripts that depend on shell-specific behavior to run correctly under the new execution method.
Description
The MASTER_PASSWORD_HOOK 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 MASTER_PASSWORD_HOOK 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.