pgAdmin 4: RCE via backslash-escape mismatch in Import/Export Data query guard (incomplete defense, sibling gap to CVE-2025-13780)
Default status is the baseline for the product, each version can override it (e.g. patched versions marked unaffected).
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| pgadmin.org | pgAdmin 4 | unaffected |
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No data.
| Vendor | Product | Versions | ||||||||
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| Pgadmin | Pgadmin 4 |
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No CVSS v3.0
No CVSS v2
This CVE is not in the KEV list.
Exploit prediction score: < 1% (0.673% probability within 30 days)
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Pgadmin
Pgadmin pgadmin 4 |
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Pgadmin
Pgadmin pgadmin 4 |
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threat_severity
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threat_severity
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ssvc
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| 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. | |
| Title | pgAdmin 4: RCE via backslash-escape mismatch in Import/Export Data query guard (incomplete defense, sibling gap to CVE-2025-13780) | |
| Weaknesses | CWE-115 CWE-78 |
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cvssV3_1
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