CVE-2018-16850

Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 5.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2018-11-13 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-89

Description

postgresql before versions 11.1, 10.6 is vulnerable to a to SQL injection in pg_upgrade and pg_dump via CREATE TRIGGER ... REFERENCING. Using a purpose-crafted trigger definition, an attacker can cause arbitrary SQL statements to run, with superuser privileges.

Affected products

Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 18.04, 18.10
PostgreSQL: from 10.0 before 10.6; from 11.0 before 11.1 — fixed in 10.6, 11.1
Red Hat Enterprise Linux: 7.0, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: PostgreSQL 10.6, 11.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/105923
http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1042144
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:3757
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2018-16850
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201811-24
https://usn.ubuntu.com/3818-1/
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1905/
http://www.securityfocus.com/bid/105923
http://www.securitytracker.com/id/1042144
https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2018:3757
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=CVE-2018-16850
https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/201811-24

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