What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2026-61820: pg_partman privilege escalation via SQL injection when inheriting template properties

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2026-09-18 · updated 2026-09-23
• Weakness: CWE-89

Description

pg_partman is a PostgreSQL extension that manages partitioned tables by time or ID. Prior to 5.5.0, inherit_template_properties() manually surrounds primary-key column names from pg_attribute.attname with double quotes without escaping embedded double-quote characters. A partman_user who owns a template table can create a crafted column name that breaks out of the generated ALTER TABLE ADD PRIMARY KEY identifier when the background worker applies the key to a child partition. The generated SQL then executes with pg_partman_bgw.role privileges, which default to PostgreSQL superuser, permitting database-wide compromise and operating-system command execution as the PostgreSQL service account. The crafted catalog identifier persists until removed and can trigger again during later partition creation. This issue is fixed in version 5.5.0.

Affected products

• pgpartman pg_partman: before 5.5.0

References

• https://github.com/pgpartman/pg_partman/commit/ba9405542acf24dd881845b935cab8b165854361
• https://github.com/pgpartman/pg_partman/releases/tag/v5.5.0
• https://github.com/pgpartman/pg_partman/security/advisories/GHSA-xqxh-6hh3-974m

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