CVE-2020-11652 — salt
MEDIUMCVE-2020-11652 is a medium-severity (CVSS 6.5) Path Traversal 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 is vulnerable Arbitrary Directory Access
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.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2020-11652.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2020-11652 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 395,249 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the 50–90% 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 allows access to some methods that improperly sanitize paths. These methods allow arbitrary directory access to authenticated users.
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
workspaces serverblackberryubuntu 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-2020-11652 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Resolve every user-supplied path to its canonical form and reject anything that escapes the intended directory, and run the component under an account that has no read or write access outside the directory it legitimately serves.
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'.
Mitigation for this issue is either not available or the currently available options do not meet the Red Hat Product Security criteria comprising ease of use and deployment, applicability to widespread installation base or stability.Source: Red Hat security advisory for CVE-2020-11652 (CC BY 4.0)
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2020-11652 in your dependencies?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.