Description
Open redirect in pgAdmin 4's multi-factor authentication flow. The MFA validate and register endpoints honoured the user-supplied 'next' query/form parameter without confirming the target pointed back inside pgAdmin, so an authenticated victim who clicked /mfa/validate?next=<external> -- a link typically delivered by phishing -- would be sent to an attacker-controlled host directly out of the trusted auth flow.
The defect is a trusted-domain redirect, not a privilege bypass: the attacker gains no read/write access to pgAdmin or the victim's database, but the redirect launders the attacker's destination through pgAdmin's URL, which raises the success rate of credential-phishing follow-on against the victim.
Fix introduces a same-origin _is_safe_redirect_url helper and gates every MFA redirect that consumes user-supplied 'next' values through it. The helper allows only relative paths and absolute URLs whose scheme is http(s) and whose host matches the current request host; it rejects external hosts in absolute and protocol-relative form, non-http schemes (javascript:, data:, mailto:), userinfo tricks (http://localhost@attacker/), and backslash variants that some browsers normalize to forward slashes. Unsafe targets fall back to the internal browser index. A dedicated regression test exercises each accept/reject category and the original reporter PoC.
This issue affects pgAdmin 4: from 6.0 before 9.16.
Affected products
| Vendor | Product | Affected | Fixed |
|---|---|---|---|
| pgadmin.org | pgAdmin 4 | 6.0 – < 9.16 | 9.16 |
Fixed in Linux distributions
Distributions backport fixes, so the version that fixes this vulnerability differs per release — upgrade to at least the version shown. From the distributions' security trackers and advisories.
openSUSE
Security tracker ↗| Release | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| openSUSE Tumbleweed | pgadmin4 | 9.17-1.1 | openSUSE-SU-2026:11508-1 |
Advisories 2
- WID-SEC-2026-2005 pgAdmin: Mehrere Schwachstellen BSI CERT-Bund (WID) · Aug 16, 2026
- openSUSE-SU-2026:11508-1 pgadmin4-9.17-1.1 on GA media SUSE / openSUSE Security Updates · Aug 14, 2026