CVE-2026-17347
Severity CVSS v4.0:
HIGH
Type:
CWE-78
OS Command Injections
Publication date:
31/07/2026
Last modified:
07/08/2026
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&#39;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 (&#39;;&#39;, &#39;$()&#39;, backticks, pipes, &#39;&&&#39;, newlines) allowed an authenticated user to execute arbitrary commands as the pgAdmin service account in any deployment where the configured hook string uses %u.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
This issue affects pgAdmin 4: from 7.2 before 9.17.
Impact
Base Score 4.0
7.70
Severity 4.0
HIGH
Base Score 3.x
7.50
Severity 3.x
HIGH
Vulnerable products and versions
| CPE | From | Up to |
|---|---|---|
| cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:*:*:*:*:*:postgresql:*:* | 7.2 (including) | 9.17 (excluding) |
To consult the complete list of CPE names with products and versions, see this page