CVE-2026-12049 — pgadmin / pgadmin_4
URL Redirection to Untrusted Site ('Open Redirect')Open redirect in pgAdmin 4's multi-factor authentication flow. The MFA validate and register endpoints honoured the user-supplied 'next' query/form parameter without confirming the target pointed back inside pgAdmin, so an authenticated victim who clicked /mfa/validate?next=<external> -- a link typically delivered by phishing -- would be sent to an attacker-controlled host directly out of the trusted auth flow.
The defect is a trusted-domain redirect, not a privilege bypass: the attacker gains no read/write access to pgAdmin or the victim's database, but the redirect launders the attacker's destination through pgAdmin's URL, which raises the success rate of credential-phishing follow-on against the victim.
Fix introduces a same-origin _is_safe_redirect_url helper and gates every MFA redirect that consumes user-supplied 'next' values through it. The helper allows only relative paths and absolute URLs whose scheme is http(s) and whose host matches the current request host; it rejects external hosts in absolute and protocol-relative form, non-http schemes (javascript:, data:, mailto:), userinfo tricks (http://localhost@attacker/), and backslash variants that some browsers normalize to forward slashes. Unsafe targets fall back to the internal browser index. A dedicated regression test exercises each accept/reject category and the original reporter PoC.
This issue affects pgAdmin 4: from 6.0 before 9.16.
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A security vulnerability is a weakness in software, hardware, or configuration that can be exploited to compromise confidentiality, integrity, or availability. Many vulnerabilities are tracked as CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), which provide a standardized identifier so teams can coordinate patching, mitigation, and risk assessment across tools and vendors.
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