20 Year old pgcrypto CVE reported
Recent vulnerabilities in the pgcrypto extension of PostgreSQL have been disclosed, specifically CVE-2026-2005 and CVE-2026-2006. Both issues, which allow for remote code execution, have existed since the extension's inception in 2005. Users are urged to patch their systems promptly to mitigate these risks, especially given the wide vulnerability surface due to default permissions.
- ▪CVE-2026-2005 is a heap overflow vulnerability that can lead to arbitrary writes on the backend heap.
- ▪CVE-2026-2006 is an encoding-validation bug that also allows for remote code execution.
- ▪The vulnerabilities were discovered through AI-assisted fuzzing during a December event.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
2026-05-15 3 min PostgreSQL Two Decades, Two RCEs: What pgcrypto Has Been Doing Since 2005 On May 4, ZeroDay.Cloud published the technical writeups for CVE-2026-2005 and CVE-2026-2006. Both are remote code execution bugs in pgcrypto. Both have been in the tree since pgcrypto was first contributed in 2005. That’s the headline. It deserves a beat to land. CVE-2026-2005 is a 32-byte heap overflow in pgp_parse_pubenc_sesskey(). The code decrypts an RSA or ElGamal session-key payload from a PGP message and copies the result into a fixed-size buffer (ctx->sess_key, bounded at 32 bytes) with no bounds check at all. Hand the function a PGP message with a larger session key and you get arbitrary writes onto the backend heap. The path to RCE inside the database process is mechanical from there.
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