Skip to main content

Deserialization of Untrusted Data

CVE-2024-2044

Medium
4.6/10

Summary

pgAdmin 4 uses a file-based session management approach. The session files are saved on disk as pickle objects. When a user performs a request, the value of the session cookie 'pga4_session' is used to retrieve the file, then its content is deserialized, and finally its signature verified. The cookie value is split in 2 parts at the first '!' character. The first part is the session ID (sid), while the second is the session digest. The vulnerability lies in versions of pgAdmin prior to 8.4 where a method loads session files by concatenating the sessions folder - located inside the pgAdmin 4 "DATA_DIR" - with the session ID. Precisely, the two values are concatenated using the ['os.path.join'] function. It does not set a trusted base-path which should not be escaped.

  • HIGH
  • NETWORK
  • LOW
  • UNCHANGED
  • REQUIRED
  • LOW
  • LOW
  • LOW

CWE-502 - Deserialization of Untrusted Data

Deserialization of untrusted data vulnerabilities enable an attacker to replace or manipulate a serialized object, replacing it with malicious data. When the object is deserialized at the victim's end the malicious data is able to compromise the victim’s system. The exploit can be devastating, its impact may range from privilege escalation, broken access control, or denial of service attacks to allowing unauthorized access to the application's internal code and logic which can compromise the entire system.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published