CVE-2020-10744 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5) CWE-377 vulnerability in ansible. A fix is available for ansible — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Exposure of Resource to Wrong Sphere and Insecure Temporary File in Ansible
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2020-10744 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 385,738 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the < 10% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Real-World Exposure
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
An incomplete fix was found for the fix of the flaw CVE-2020-1733 ansible: insecure temporary directory when running become_user from become directive. The provided fix is insufficient to prevent the race condition on systems using ACLs and FUSE filesystems. Ansible Engine 2.7.18, 2.8.12, and 2.9.9 as well as previous versions are affected and Ansible Tower 3.4.5, 3.5.6 and 3.6.4 as well as previous versions are affected.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | ansible | ≥ 2.10.0a1&&< 2.10.0rc1 | 2.10.0rc1pip install --upgrade 'ansible==2.10.0rc1' |
| 🐍PyPI | ansible | all versions | 2.9.12pip install --upgrade 'ansible==2.9.12' |
Affected Products
ansibleredhatansible towerredhatDetection & 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 2.10.0rc1 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2020-10744 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.
Ansible Engine 2.7.18, 2.8.12, and 2.9.9 as well as previous versions are affected. Ansible Tower 3.4.5, 3.5.6 and 3.6.4 as well as previous versions are affected. Red Hat Gluster Storage 3 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 no longer maintain their own versions of Ansible. The fix will be provided from core Ansible. However,…
Currently, there is no mitigation for this issue.Source: Red Hat security advisory for CVE-2020-10744 (CC BY 4.0)
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2020-10744 in your dependencies?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.