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VulnerabilityPublished

CVE-2026-17566: pgAdmin 4 · OS Command Injection

Affects pgAdmin 4Source CVE Database V5

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Mentioned vulnerabilities

Not known to be exploited · CVSS 9.9 Critical : upgrade to 9.18 as a priority.

Data as of 30 Oct 2026, 06:59 UTC

CVSS 3.1 base score
9.9Critical
How severe the flaw is on the 0–10 CVSS scale.
EPSS
0.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days – higher than 52% of CVEsExploit Prediction Scoring System: the likelihood attackers will use this flaw soon.
Patch
Available – fixed in 9.18
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

Exploitation evidence

  1. Disclosed: evidence found.

    CVE published 31 Jul 2026

  2. Detectable: no evidence on record.

    No public nuclei template indexed

  3. Weaponized: evidence found.

    Public exploit code: GitHub proofs of concept

  4. Exploited in the wild: no evidence on record.

    Not in CISA KEV and no source reports exploitation

  5. Observed by OffSeq 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), GitHub proofs of concept, the Metasploit, Exploit-DB and nuclei-templates index as of 29 Oct 2026.

What to do

Upgrade pgAdmin 4 to 9.18.

Affected software

ProductAffectedFixed in
pgadmin.orgpgAdmin 4Affected
  • <9.18
Fixed in
  • 9.18
GitHubpgAdmin 4pkg:github/pgAdmin 4Other threatsAffected
  • <9.18
Fixed in
  • 9.18

Check your own hosts for these packages with threat-finder (opens in a new tab), our free open-source scanner.

AI-suggested

The vendor fixed the issue by rejecting any backslash inside single-quoted strings in queries to prevent ambiguous parsing. If you cannot patch yet, restrict access to the tools_import_export_data permission and avoid using the Import/Export Data feature with untrusted input.

Description

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, create_import_export_job() (route POST /import_export/job/<sid>, gated only by the ordinary, commonly-granted tools_import_export_data permission) validated the query with a hand-written parenthesis-balance checker, _is_query_parens_balanced(). That checker always treated a backslash before a single quote (\') as escaping the quote, i.e. as if standard_conforming_strings were off. PostgreSQL has defaulted standard_conforming_strings 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 standard_conforming_strings 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 _is_query_parens_balanced() before 9.18.

References

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