Bug 2568372 (CVE-2026-116246)

Summary: CVE-2026-116246 pgadmin4: pgAdmin 4: Credential exposure via shared process environment
Product: [Other] Security Response Reporter: OSIDB Bzimport <bzimport>
Component: vulnerabilityAssignee: Product Security DevOps Team <prodsec-dev>
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Priority: medium    
Version: unspecifiedKeywords: Security
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OS: Linux   
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A flaw was found in pgAdmin 4. This vulnerability allows an authenticated user to obtain sensitive credentials and achieve unauthorized database access when the application runs in server mode. When executing background utilities or command-line database sessions, pgAdmin 4 writes database passwords into its shared process environment without removing them afterwards. A subsequent user can inherit these residual credentials, enabling them to connect to database servers using another user's saved credentials.
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Bug Depends On: 2568979    
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Description OSIDB Bzimport 2026-11-06 16:23:32 UTC 
To pass a server's password to psql and to the utilities pgAdmin 4 runs as background processes, the server manager wrote it into pgAdmin's own process environment: as PGPASSWORD for the PSQL tool, and under a per-process variable for a utility. Nothing removed it afterwards. pgAdmin's environment is shared by every user's requests and copied into every process it starts, so in server mode another user's later PSQL session or utility inherited the password, and libpq used PGPASSWORD for any connection made without a password of its own, letting one user connect with another user's saved password.

The fix puts the password only into the environment built for the process that needs it and starts psql with a copy of pgAdmin's environment instead of the environment itself.

This issue affects pgAdmin 4: before 9.19.