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
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-2018-10875 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 377,636 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
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' |
Detection & 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.
How O3 protects you
O3 Security's impact-aware SCA analyses which vulnerable code paths your application actually calls, so a match like CVE-2018-10875 can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to CVE-2018-10875. 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.
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?
O3 Security finds CVE-2018-10875 across PyPI dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.