CVE-2026-116250

Dashboard / Vulnerabilities / CVE-2026-116250

CVE-2026-116250

Summary: pgAdmin 4: Files opened in a storage directory follow a symbolic link, hard link or FIFO planted after the containment check

Details: In server mode pgAdmin 4 validates a path a user gives for a file in their storage directory with check_access_permission() and then opened it by name. Several places opened it with a plain open() or handed the path to a utility that opened it later: the servers.json export and import and the import file listing, and the files given to pg_dump, pg_dumpall, pg_restore and psql by Backup, Restore and Import/Export Data. A symbolic link swapped in at the file or at any parent directory between the check and the open redirected the operation outside the storage directory, so a file could be written, overwritten or read, or loaded into a table, as the operating-system account running pgAdmin. A hard link to an outside file, which O_NOFOLLOW does not detect, and a FIFO, which could hang a request, had the same effect. CVE-2026-86861 fixed this for the File Manager's save_file; these were the remaining paths. Exploitation requires creating such a link or FIFO inside the user's storage directory. pgAdmin offers no way to do so, and the per-user storage directories belong to the pgAdmin account, so this requires write access to the storage backend as a different operating-system user, for example a shared or network-mounted storage directory, and winning the race. The fix opens each file by walking down from the storage directory one component at a time with O_NOFOLLOW, accepting only a regular file with one link, and passes the utilities the open descriptor (/dev/fd/N) on Linux. Error messages no longer include the server path. This issue affects pgAdmin 4: before 9.19.

References: https://github.com/CVEProject/cvelistV5/tree/main/cves/2026/116xxx/CVE-2026-116250.json, https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2026-116250, https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgadmin4/issues/10647, https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgadmin4/commit/730d1e783c339ec696a1f77f2eee6f4b52cb6c37, https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgadmin4/commit/99f5606e2ebc7c94c7acdbab877ce7de54bfc756, https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgadmin4/commit/c4321b9968342716f34bc5f10de6cac3c0567e68, https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgadmin4