{"id":"CVE-2026-17566","url":"https://www.cyber-defence.io/tools/cve/CVE-2026-17566","generatedAt":"2026-10-28T02:20:24.074Z","title":"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…","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).\n\nThe 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.\n\nThis issue affects pgAdmin 4: from the introduction of _is_query_parens_balanced() before 9.18.","published":"2026-07-31T16:17:00.000Z","lastModified":"2026-10-23T23:10:00.000Z","status":"Analyzed","sourceIdentifier":"f86ef6dc-4d3a-42ad-8f28-e6d5547a5007","cvss":{"version":"4.0","score":9.4,"severity":"CRITICAL","vector":"CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:L/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:H/SI:H/SA:H/E:X/CR:X/IR:X/AR:X/MAV:X/MAC:X/MAT:X/MPR:X/MUI:X/MVC:X/M"},"cwe":["CWE-78","CWE-115"],"affected":["pgadmin/pgadmin 4"],"epss":{"score":0.00673,"percentile":0.5185,"date":"2026-10-26","history":[]},"kev":{"listed":false},"exploits":{"count":0,"verified":false,"firstPublished":null,"source":"Exploit-DB (https://gitlab.com/exploit-database/exploitdb)","entries":[]},"verdict":{"level":"high","text":"High impact if exploited, but EPSS currently rates exploitation as unlikely (0.67%). Schedule it in the normal patch cycle and watch for a rise in EPSS or a public exploit."},"changes":[],"references":[{"url":"https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgadmin4/commit/1496fabe28c9f825f6bac0f0d000d9d3276322c3","tags":["Patch"],"source":"f86ef6dc-4d3a-42ad-8f28-e6d5547a5007"},{"url":"https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgadmin4/issues/10213","tags":["Issue Tracking","Patch"],"source":"f86ef6dc-4d3a-42ad-8f28-e6d5547a5007"}],"sources":{"nvd":"https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-17566","epss":"https://www.first.org/epss/","kev":"https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog","exploitdb":"https://www.exploit-db.com/"},"licence":"CC BY 4.0 — link back to the CVE Explorer if you publish the results; upstream data remains subject to its own terms."}