jackc/pgx · Security

pgx: SQL Injection via placeholder confusion with dollar quoted string literals

GHSA ID
GHSA-j88v-2chj-qfwx
CVE ID
CVE-2026-41889
Severity
low
Published
Updated
CVSS v4
2.3 · CVSS:4.0/AV:N/AC:H/AT:P/PR:L/UI:N/VC:N/VI:L/VA:N/SC:N/SI:N/SA:N

Description

Impact

SQL Injection can occur when:

  1. The non-default simple protocol is used.
  2. A dollar quoted string literal is used in the SQL query.
  3. That string literal contains text that would be would be interpreted as a placeholder outside of a string literal.
  4. The value of that placeholder is controllable by the attacker.

e.g.

attackValue := `$tag$; drop table canary; --`
_, err = tx.Exec(ctx, `select $tag$ $1 $tag$, $1`, pgx.QueryExecModeSimpleProtocol, attackValue)

This is unlikely to occur outside of a contrived scenario.

Patches

The problem is resolved in v5.9.2.

Workarounds

Do not use the simple protocol to execute queries matching all the above conditions.

CWEs

References