CVE-2026-12044

Summary

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 render_template 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, foreign_servers/__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.

Affected Software

VendorProductVersion RangeStatus
pgadmin.orgpgAdmin 41.0 < 9.16affected

Weaknesses

  • CWE-89: CWE-89 Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an SQL Command ('SQL Injection')
  • CWE-116: CWE-116 Improper Encoding or Escaping of Output

ADP Enrichment

CISA ADP Vulnrichment

  • SSVC:
  • Exploitation: none
    • Automatable: no
    • Technical Impact: total

References