CVE-2016-4985 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.5) Information Exposure vulnerability in ironic. A fix is available for ironic — see the affected versions and patch details below.
OpenStack Ironic Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
Where this sits among everything scored
Real-World Exposure
ironic🐍ironicReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects PyPI packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
The ironic-api service in OpenStack Ironic before 4.2.5 (Liberty) and 5.x before 5.1.2 (Mitaka) allows remote attackers to obtain sensitive information about a registered node by leveraging knowledge of the MAC address of a network card belonging to that node and sending a crafted POST request to the v1/drivers/$DRIVER_NAME/vendor_passthru resource.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | ironic | all versions | 4.2.5pip install --upgrade 'ironic==4.2.5' |
| 🐍PyPI | ironic | ≥ 5.0&&< 5.1.2 | 5.1.2pip install --upgrade 'ironic==5.1.2' |
Affected Products
openstack ironiccanonicalopenstackredhatDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for ironic, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update ironic to 4.2.5 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2016-4985 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Assume what was exposed is already known: rotate any credential, token or key that the affected component could return, restrict the endpoint to callers that genuinely need it, and strip sensitive fields from responses and error output at the boundary rather than relying on the client not to read them.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7.0 (Kilo) for RHEL 7 | openstack-ironic-0:2015.1.2-4.el7ost | RHSA-2016:1377 |
| Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8.0 (Liberty) | openstack-ironic-1:4.2.5-1.el7ost | RHSA-2016:1378 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2016-4985 in your dependencies?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.