Description
On Tuesday, November 3, VMware’s SaltStack released details on three new CVEs. The two more severe vulnerabilities, CVE-2020-16846 and CVE-2020-25592, affect SaltStack’s Salt API and are the focus of this analysis. CVE-2020-16846 allows an unauthenticated attacker with network access to use shell injections to run code on the Salt-API using the SSH client. CVE-2020-25592 allows an attacker to bypass authentication and make calls to Salt SSH by supplying any value for “eauth” or “token”. A successful attack using the two vulnerabilities can result in unauthenticated remote root access on a target system.
Note: This analysis is the same as the analysis posted to CVE-2020-25592.
Affected products
A patch is available for the following affected Salt versions:
- 3002
- 3001.1, 3001.2
- 3000.3, 3000.4
- 2019.2.5, 2019.2.6
- 2018.3.5
- 2017.7.4, 2017.7.8
- 2016.11.3, 2016.11.6, 2016.11.10
- 2016.3.4, 2016.3.6, 2016.3.8
- 2015.8.10, 2015.8.13
Rapid7 analysis
None of the CVEs have a severity rating associated with them, but it hardly matters much what the eventual severity ratings turn out to be. Pre-authenticated remote root is the gold-medal standard for attackers, and it took Rapid7 researchers a mere 15 minutes and a single HTTP request to get there. CVE-2020-11651, another Salt vulnerability from April 2020, was exploited quickly by threat actors. We expect CVEs 2020-16846 and 2020-25592 to follow that same path.
Guidance
SaltStack customers should patch as quickly as possible, prioritizing these vulnerabilities above other tasks—if at all possible, please don’t wait for your typical patch cycle to apply SaltStack security updates. There are no known mitigations or workarounds as of November 9, 2020.
References
- https://www.saltstack.com/blog/on-november-3-2020-saltstack-publicly-disclosed-three-new-cves/
- https://gitlab.com/saltstack/open/salt-patches
