As of this review, here are hacktricks that still work on fully patched phpMyAdmin if you have the right conditions:
These are not patched because they are configuration issues, not code bugs.
For years, the developers of phpMyAdmin treated security as a reaction—fixing bugs as they were reported. But the sheer volume of automated attacks and the severity of the vulnerabilities forced a paradigm shift. The project began to adopt a proactive security posture, moving from simple patching to architectural restructuring. phpmyadmin hacktricks patched
The death of the famous preg_replace hack was the first major victory. The developers audited every line of code that utilized regular expressions, stripping away the dangerous /e modifier. They transitioned to preg_replace_callback, which separates the logic from the pattern, neutralizing the injection vector. It was a surgical removal of a cancerous feature.
However, the most significant change was the abolition of the "AllowRoot" default. Historically, phpMyAdmin allowed the root database user to log in by default. If an attacker brute-forced the root password, they owned the database. Modern versions now default to AllowNoPassword set to FALSE and aggressively warn against root login without a password. Furthermore, the introduction of configuration storage databases meant that sensitive settings were moved out of the file system, reducing the attack surface for local file inclusion (LFI) attacks. As of this review, here are hacktricks that
When a security advisory says "phpMyAdmin patched," it usually means one or more of the following defense layers have been applied.
In 2020, a severe vulnerability (CVE-2020-10803) allowed an authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary SQL commands via a crafted CREATE TABLE statement that included PHP code in the table comment. This was combined with the save_workers functionality. These are not patched because they are configuration
The Patch: phpMyAdmin 5.0.2 introduced strict escaping of user-defined table comments and validated all SQL query outputs.
The Bypass (Partial): While direct RCE is patched, an attacker with admin access can still use INTO OUTFILE to write a webshell, provided the secure_file_priv MySQL variable is empty.
This is the oldest trick in the book. Many administrators leave default credentials (root:root, root:password, pma:pmapass) or fail to change the controluser password defined in config.inc.php.