Vulnerability Details CVE-2026-17347
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.
Exploit prediction scoring system (EPSS) score
EPSS Score 0.003
EPSS Ranking 21.9%
CVSS Severity
CVSS v3 Score 7.5
Products affected by CVE-2026-17347
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:7.2
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:7.3
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:7.4
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:7.5
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:7.6
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:7.7
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:7.8
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:8.0
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:8.1
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:8.10
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:8.11
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:8.12
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:8.13
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:8.14
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:8.2
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:8.3
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:8.4
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:8.5
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:8.6
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:8.7
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:8.8
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:8.9
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.0
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.1
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.10
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.11
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.12
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.13
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.14
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.15
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.16
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.2
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.3
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.4
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.5
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.6
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.7
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.8
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cpe:2.3:a:pgadmin:pgadmin_4:9.9