CVE-2026-116250: high-severity vulnerability in pgadmin.org pgAdmin 4
pgAdmin 4: Files opened in a storage directory follow a symbolic link, hard link or FIFO planted after the containment check
Published
E-mail alert when it lands in KEV, gets a public PoC or its score goes up.
21Vexday Risk Score
No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.
ssvc Trackcvss 7.3epss 0.1%
In server mode pgAdmin 4 validates a path a user gives for a file in their storage directory with check_access_permission() and then opened it by name. Several places opened it with a plain open() or handed the path to a utility that opened it later: the servers.json export and import and the import file listing, and the files given to pg_dump, pg_dumpall, pg_restore and psql by Backup, Restore and Import/Export Data. A symbolic link swapped in at the file or at any parent directory between the check and the open redirected the operation outside the storage directory, so a file could be written, overwritten or read, or loaded into a table, as the operating-system account running pgAdmin. A hard link to an outside file, which O_NOFOLLOW does not detect, and a FIFO, which could hang a request, had the same effect. CVE-2026-86861 fixed this for the File Manager's save_file; these were the remaining paths.
Exploitation requires creating such a link or FIFO inside the user's storage directory. pgAdmin offers no way to do so, and the per-user storage directories belong to the pgAdmin account, so this requires write access to the storage backend as a different operating-system user, for example a shared or network-mounted storage directory, and winning the race.
The fix opens each file by walking down from the storage directory one component at a time with O_NOFOLLOW, accepting only a regular file with one link, and passes the utilities the open descriptor (/dev/fd/N) on Linux. Error messages no longer include the server path.
This issue affects pgAdmin 4: before 9.19.
CVSS:4.0/AV:L/AC:H/AT:P/PR:L/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:L/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N
Affected products
pgadmin.org · pgAdmin 4Related CVEs — pgadmin.org pgAdmin 4
In the same product, most dangerous first.
CVE-2024-2044CRITICALUnsafe Deserialisation and Remote Code Execution by an Authenticated user in pgAdmin 4EPSS 79.5%CVE-2024-3116HIGHRemote Code Execution Vulnerability through the validate binary path API in pgAdmin 4EPSS 65.8%CVE-2025-2945CRITICALpgAdmin 4: Remote Code Execution in Query Tool and Cloud DeploymentEPSS 56.3%CVE-2025-12762CRITICALRemote Code Execution vulnerability when restoring PLAIN-format SQL dumps in server mode (pgAdmin 4)EPSS 12.7%CVE-2024-9014CRITICALOAuth2 client id and secret exposed through the web browser in pgAdmin 4EPSS 9.7%CVE-2026-7816HIGHpgAdmin 4: OS command injection in Import/Export query export via psql metacommand breakoutEPSS 1.4%
References
https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgadmin4/commit/730d1e783c339ec696a1f77f2eee6f4b52cb6c37https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgadmin4/commit/99f5606e2ebc7c94c7acdbab877ce7de54bfc756https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgadmin4/commit/c4321b9968342716f34bc5f10de6cac3c0567e68https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgadmin4/issues/10647