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
| Vendor | Product | Affected | Fixed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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.
openSUSE
Security tracker ↗| Release | Package | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|---|
| openSUSE Tumbleweed | pgadmin4 | 9.17-1.1 | openSUSE-SU-2026:11508-1 |
Advisories 2
- WID-SEC-2026-2613 pgAdmin: Mehrere Schwachstellen BSI CERT-Bund (WID) · Nov 1, 2026
- openSUSE-SU-2026:11508-1 pgadmin4-9.17-1.1 on GA media SUSE / openSUSE Security Updates · Aug 14, 2026