CVE-2025-12764
📋 TL;DR
pgAdmin versions up to 9.9 have an LDAP injection vulnerability in the authentication flow that allows attackers to inject special LDAP characters in usernames. This can cause denial of service by making the LDAP server and client process excessive data. All pgAdmin deployments using LDAP authentication are affected.
💻 Affected Systems
- pgAdmin
📦 What is this software?
Pgadmin 4 by Pgadmin
⚠️ Risk & Real-World Impact
Worst Case
Complete denial of service for pgAdmin authentication, potentially affecting all users and causing service disruption until the LDAP server recovers from resource exhaustion.
Likely Case
Temporary authentication service disruption for pgAdmin users, requiring LDAP server restart and potentially affecting legitimate user access.
If Mitigated
Minimal impact with proper input validation and LDAP server resource limits in place.
🎯 Exploit Status
Exploitation requires ability to attempt authentication with malicious username payloads.
🛠️ Fix & Mitigation
✅ Official Fix
Patch Version: 9.10 or later
Vendor Advisory: https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgadmin4/issues/9325
Restart Required: Yes
Instructions:
1. Upgrade pgAdmin to version 9.10 or later. 2. Restart pgAdmin service. 3. Verify LDAP authentication works with normal credentials.
🔧 Temporary Workarounds
Disable LDAP Authentication
allTemporarily switch to local authentication or other auth methods until patching is possible.
Modify pgAdmin configuration to use non-LDAP authentication
LDAP Server Input Filtering
allConfigure LDAP server to filter or reject special characters in authentication requests.
Configure LDAP server ACLs and input validation rules
🧯 If You Can't Patch
- Implement network segmentation to restrict access to pgAdmin LDAP authentication endpoints
- Deploy WAF or reverse proxy with LDAP injection detection rules
🔍 How to Verify
Check if Vulnerable:
Check pgAdmin version and verify LDAP authentication is enabled in configuration.Check Version:
pgadmin4 --versionVerify Fix Applied:
Verify pgAdmin version is 9.10 or later and test LDAP authentication with normal credentials.📡 Detection & Monitoring
Log Indicators:
- Unusual LDAP query patterns in pgAdmin logs
- Failed authentication attempts with special characters in username
- LDAP server resource exhaustion alerts
Network Indicators:
- Multiple authentication attempts with payloads containing LDAP special characters
- Unusually large LDAP queries from pgAdmin server
SIEM Query:
source="pgadmin" AND (username CONTAINS "*" OR username CONTAINS "(" OR username CONTAINS ")")