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OpenAdvisories
High · 7.5 CVE-2026-17347 EUVD-2026-51560GHSA-f649-fjv9-qgcg

pgAdmin 4: OS command injection in MASTER_PASSWORD_HOOK via untrusted username substitution

Published Jul 31, 2026 · Updated Aug 1, 2026 · Assigned by PostgreSQL

Description

The MASTER_PASSWORD_HOOK setting, introduced in pgAdmin 4 7.2, lets an administrator configure an external command that returns a per-user encryption key, with %u in the configured string replaced by the current user's name. The previous implementation substituted the username directly into the command string and executed the result with subprocess.Popen(..., shell=True). Because the username can originate from an external authentication source (OAuth/OIDC claims, Kerberos, webserver auth) rather than a value pgAdmin fully controls, a username containing shell metacharacters (';', '$()', backticks, pipes, '&&', newlines) allowed an authenticated user to execute arbitrary commands as the pgAdmin service account in any deployment where the configured hook string uses %u.

Fix tokenises the trusted, administrator-configured hook string into an argument vector first (using shlex in POSIX-quoting mode, with backslash-escaping disabled so Windows-style paths are not mis-parsed), substitutes the untrusted username into the individual argv elements, and executes with shell=False. The username is therefore always confined to a single argv element; any shell metacharacters it contains are inert. Administrators whose MASTER_PASSWORD_HOOK previously relied on shell features (pipes, redirection, environment-variable expansion, globbing) within the hook string itself must move that logic into the invoked script, since it is no longer interpreted by a shell.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: from 7.2 before 9.17.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
pgadmin.org pgAdmin 4 7.2 – < 9.17 9.17

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.

ReleasePackageFixed inAdvisory
openSUSE Tumbleweed pgadmin4 9.17-1.1 openSUSE-SU-2026:11508-1

Advisories 2

References