CVE-2018-10875 is a high-severity (CVSS 7.8) CWE-426 vulnerability in ansible. A fix is available for ansible — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Ansible Arbitrary Code Execution
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
ansible🐍ansible🐍ansibleReal-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
A flaw was found in ansible. ansible.cfg is read from the current working directory which can be altered to make it point to a plugin or a module path under the control of an attacker, thus allowing the attacker to execute arbitrary code.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | ansible | all versions | 2.4.6.0pip install --upgrade 'ansible==2.4.6.0' |
| 🐍PyPI | ansible | ≥ 2.5.0a1&&< 2.5.6 | 2.5.6pip install --upgrade 'ansible==2.5.6' |
| 🐍PyPI | ansible | ≥ 2.6.0a1&&< 2.6.1 | 2.6.1pip install --upgrade 'ansible==2.6.1' |
Affected Products
ubuntu linuxcanonicaldebian linuxdebianansible engineredhatceph storageredhatgluster storageredhatopenshiftredhatDetection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for ansible, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update ansible to 2.4.6.0 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2018-10875 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.
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.
Red Hat Gluster Storage 3 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 ships the affected version of ansible, but they no longer maintain their own version of ansible. Both the products will consume fixes directly from ansible repository.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.4 for RHEL 7 | ansible-0:2.4.6.0-1.el7ae | RHSA-2018:2152 |
| Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.5 for RHEL 7 | ansible-0:2.5.6-1.el7ae | RHSA-2018:2150 |
| Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.6 for RHEL 7 | ansible-0:2.6.1-1.el7ae | RHSA-2018:2166 |
| Red Hat Ansible Engine 2 for RHEL 7 | ansible-0:2.6.1-1.el7ae | RHSA-2018:2151 |
| Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10.0 (Newton) | ansible-0:2.4.6.0-1.el7ae | RHSA-2019:0054 |
| Red Hat OpenStack Platform 12.0 (Pike) | ansible-0:2.4.6.0-1.el7ae | RHBA-2018:3788 |
| Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13.0 (Queens) | ansible-0:2.4.6.0-1.el7ae | RHSA-2018:2585 |
| Red Hat Virtualization 4 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 | imgbased-0:1.0.22-1.el7ev | RHSA-2018:2321 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2018-10875 in your dependencies?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.