CVE-2016-4985 — ironic
HIGHCVE-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
EPSS (Exploit Prediction Scoring System) is a daily probability model maintained by FIRST.org. It estimates the likelihood a CVE will be exploited in production environments within the next 30 days, derived from real-world threat intelligence signals.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2016-4985 plotted by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). The shaded corner — EPSS 50%+ and CVSS 7.0+ — is where this CVE doesn't sit, though severity or exploitability alone can still warrant action.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 377,166 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Real counts from FIRST.org, not a sample — log-scaled since the landscape is heavily right-skewed.
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' |
Detection & 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
If you can't upgrade right away: gate or disable the affected feature, validate untrusted input at the boundary, and avoid passing attacker-controlled data into the vulnerable path. O3's runtime protection blocks exploitation in production as an interim safeguard until the upgrade lands.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2016-4985 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2016-4985. Runtime protection reduces exposure until a permanent patch is applied and verified — it complements patching, it doesn't replace it.
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?
O3 Security finds CVE-2016-4985 across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.