9.4 CRITICAL
- CVSS version (CVSS): 4.0
- Attack Vector (AV): Network (N)
- Attack Complexity (AC): Low (L)
- Attack Requirement (AT): None (N)
- Privileges Required (PR): Low (L)
- User Interaction (UI): None (N)
- Vulnerable System Impact Confidentiality (VC): High (H)
- Vulnerable System Impact Integrity (VI): High (H)
- Vulnerable System Impact Availability (VA): High (H)
- Subsequent System Impact Confidentiality (SC): High (H)
- Subsequent System Impact Integrity (SI): High (H)
- Subsequent System Impact Availability (SA): High (H)
- Modified Attack Vector (MAV): Network (N)
- Modified Attack Complexity (MAC): Low (L)
- Modified Attack Requirement (MAT): None (N)
- Modified Privileges Required (MPR): Low (L)
- Modified User Interaction (MUI): None (N)
- Modified Vulnerable System Impact Confidentiality (MVC): High (H)
- Modified Vulnerable System Impact Integrity (MVI): High (H)
- Modified Vulnerable System Impact Availability (MVA): High (H)
- Modified Subsequent System Impact Confidentiality (MSC): High (H)
- Modified Subsequent System Impact Integrity (MSI): High (H)
- Modified Subsequent System Impact Availability (MSA): High (H)
- Safety (S): Not Defined (X)
- Automatable (AU): Not Defined (X)
- Recovery (R): Not Defined (X)
- Value Density (V): Not Defined (X)
- Vulnerability Response Effort (RE): Not Defined (X)
- Provider Urgency (U): Not Defined (X)
- Confidentiality Req. (CR): Not Defined (X)
- Integrity Req. (IR): Not Defined (X)
- Availability Req. (AR): Not Defined (X)
- Exploit Maturity (E): Not Defined (X)
Activity log
- Created & dismissed (no matching packages found) suggestion
pgAdmin 4: RCE via backslash-escape mismatch in Import/Export Data query guard (incomplete defense, sibling gap to CVE-2025-13780)
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
Affected products
- <9.18