CVE-2023-20897 — salt
MEDIUMCVE-2023-20897 is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.3) CWE-404 vulnerability in salt. A fix is available for salt — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Salt vulnerable to denial of service
Exploitation Status
No confirmed exploitation observed yet
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- CISA’s own triage has not observed active exploitation or public proof-of-concept code for this CVE as of its last assessment.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA’s SSVC triage for CVE-2023-20897.
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
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
Salt masters prior to 3005.2 or 3006.2 contain a DOS in minion return. After receiving several bad packets on the request server equal to the number of worker threads, the master will become unresponsive to return requests until restarted.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🐍PyPI | salt | all versions | 3005.2pip install --upgrade 'salt==3005.2' |
| 🐍PyPI | salt | ≥ 3006.0rc1&&< 3006.2 | 3006.2pip install --upgrade 'salt==3006.2' |
Affected Products
saltsaltstackDetection & 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 3005.2 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms CVE-2023-20897 is resolved across your whole dependency graph.
Workarounds
Cap what an attacker can consume: apply request size, rate and timeout limits in front of the affected component, and run it with memory and CPU limits so exhaustion degrades one worker rather than the whole service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2023-20897 in your dependencies?
Find it across PyPI, including transitive dependencies.