An attacker can exploit phpMyAdmin before 4.8.4 to leak the contents of a local file because of an error in the transformation feature. The attacker must have access to the phpMyAdmin Configuration Storage tables, although these can easily be created in any database to which the attacker has access. An attacker must have valid credentials to log in to phpMyAdmin; this vulnerability does not allow an attacker to circumvent the login system.

phpMyAdmin 4.7.x and 4.8.x versions prior to 4.8.4 are affected by a series of CSRF flaws. By deceiving a user into clicking on a crafted URL, it is possible to perform harmful SQL operations such as renaming databases, creating new tables/routines, deleting designer pages, adding/deleting users, updating user passwords, killing SQL processes, etc.

In phpMyAdmin before 4.8.4, an XSS vulnerability was found in the navigation tree, where an attacker can deliver a payload to a user through a crafted database/table name.

An issue was discovered in phpMyAdmin before 4.8.5. A vulnerability was reported where a specially crafted username can be used to trigger a SQL injection attack through the designer feature.

An issue was discovered in phpMyAdmin before 4.8.5. When the AllowArbitraryServer configuration setting is set to true, with the use of a rogue MySQL server, an attacker can read any file on the server that the web server's user can access. This is related to the mysql.allow_local_infile PHP configuration, and the inadvertent ignoring of "options(MYSQLI_OPT_LOCAL_INFILE" calls.