GHSA-j88v-2chj-qfwxLow

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

Published
April 22, 2026
Last Modified
May 13, 2026

🔗 CVE IDs covered (1)

📋 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.

🎯 Affected products3

  • go/github.com/jackc/pgx/v5:< 5.9.2
  • go/github.com/jackc/pgx/v4:<= 4.18.3
  • go/github.com/jackc/pgx:<= 3.6.2

🔗 References (5)