pgAdmin 4: Open redirect in multi-factor authentication flow via unvalidated 'next' parameter
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.
Problem Types
| Type | CWE ID | Description |
|---|
| CWE | CWE-601 | CWE-601 URL Redirection to Untrusted Site ('Open Redirect') |
Type: CWE
Description: CWE-601 URL Redirection to Untrusted Site ('Open Redirect')
Metrics
| Version | Base score | Base severity | Vector |
|---|
| 3.1 | 4.3 | MEDIUM | CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N |
| 4.0 | 5.3 | MEDIUM | CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:P/VC:N/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N |
Version: 3.1
Base score: 4.3
Base severity: MEDIUM
Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N
Version: 4.0
Base score: 5.3
Base severity: MEDIUM
Vector: CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:P/VC:N/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N