CVE-2026-116240
Received
Received - Intake
Path Traversal Vulnerability in pgAdmin 4 Server Mode
Vulnerability report for CVE-2026-116240, including description, CVSS score, EPSS score, affected products, exploitability, helpful resources, and attack-flow context.
Publication date: 2026-10-30
Last updated on: 2026-10-30
Assigner: PostgreSQL
Description
Description
In server mode pgAdmin 4 validates a path into the user's storage directory with check_access_permission(), which builds the absolute path with get_abs_path(). Several callers then acted on a path they built differently, so the path checked and the path used could name different files:
- Opening a file in the Query Tool, the Google client secret and, on Windows, Import/Export Data, Backup, Restore and saving a file joined the path to the storage directory after stripping leading slashes and backslashes. On POSIX a path checked as a name inside storage could become an absolute path once stripped, so any file the pgAdmin account can read could be opened; on Windows a path naming a drive discarded the storage directory, so these could read, or write, outside it.
- Listing a folder decoded the path a second time after the check, so a folder named like an encoded "..", which a user can create, listed any directory on the host.
- Download, delete, rename and the file-exists check appended the path to the storage directory without a separator, so in a deployment where one user's storage directory name is a prefix of another's, another user's files could be read, deleted or moved; download also checked the path appended to itself.
- Creating a folder could create one in another user's directory.
The fix makes check_access_permission() return the path it checked and every caller act on that path, decodes folder paths once, and opens, deletes and renames files relative to directories opened from the storage directory without following symbolic links. Desktop mode is not affected.
This issue affects pgAdmin 4: before 9.19.
CVSS Scores
EPSS Scores
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Meta Information
Affected Vendors & Products
| Vendor | Product | Version / Range |
|---|---|---|
| pgadmin.org | pgAdmin 4 | 0 |
Helpful Resources
Exploitability
CWE
KEV
| CWE ID | Description |
|---|---|
| CWE-367 | The product checks the state of a resource before using that resource, but the resource's state can change between the check and the use in a way that invalidates the results of the check. |
| CWE-22 | The product uses external input to construct a pathname that is intended to identify a file or directory that is located underneath a restricted parent directory, but the product does not properly neutralize special elements within the pathname that can cause the pathname to resolve to a location that is outside of the restricted directory. |
