CVE-2020-11651 — salt
CRITICALCVE-2020-11651 is a critical-severity (CVSS 9.8) vulnerability in salt. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2021-11-03) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. A fix is available for salt — see the affected versions and patch details below.
SaltStack Salt Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2021-11-03. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2022-05-03.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2020-11651.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2020-11651 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). In the shaded patch-first corner (EPSS 50%+, CVSS 7.0+).
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the ≥ 90% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Real-World Exposure
salt🐍saltReal-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 issue was discovered in SaltStack Salt before 2019.2.4 and 3000 before 3000.2. The salt-master process ClearFuncs class does not properly validate method calls. This allows a remote user to access some methods without authentication. These methods can be used to retrieve user tokens from the salt master and/or run arbitrary commands on salt minions.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | salt | all versions | 2019.2.4pip install --upgrade 'salt==2019.2.4' |
| 🐍PyPI | salt | ≥ 3000&&< 3000.2 | 3000.2pip install --upgrade 'salt==3000.2' |
Affected Products
ubuntu linuxcanonicaldebian linuxdebianleapopensusesaltsaltstackapplication remote collectorvmwareResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Saltstack 3000.1 - Remote Code Execution
by Jasper Lievisse Adriaanse · May 5, 2020
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for salt, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update salt to 2019.2.4 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2020-11651 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 Ceph Storage 2 shipped salt for the usage of Red Hat Storage Console 2(RHSCON-2), which required salt to administrate ceph nodes. RHSCON-2 has reached End Of Life, hence salt is no longer used and supported. Therefore, the salt package provided by Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 has been marked as 'will not fix'.
Red Hat has investigated whether a possible mitigation exists for this issue, and has not been able to identify a practical example. Please update as soon as possible.Source: Red Hat security advisory for CVE-2020-11651 (CC BY 4.0)
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2020-11651 in your dependencies?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.