GHSA-vw22-465p-8j5w is a medium-severity (CVSS 5.5) Improper Privilege Management vulnerability in puppet. A fix is available for puppet — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Tarball permission preservation in puppet
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
GHSA-vw22-465p-8j5w 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 379,145 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
puppet💎puppetReal-time download stats are indexed for npm and PyPI packages. This vulnerability affects RubyGems packages — download data is not available via public APIs for these ecosystems.
Description
When installing a module using the system tar, the PMT will filter filesystem permissions to a sane value. This may just be based on the user's umask.
When using minitar, files are unpacked with whatever permissions are in the tarball. This is potentially unsafe, as tarballs can be easily created with weird permissions.
Affected Packages
| Ecosystem | Package | Vulnerable range | Fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| 💎RubyGems | puppet | all versions | 4.10.10bundle update puppet --conservative |
| 💎RubyGems | puppet | ≥ 5.0.0&&< 5.3.4 | 5.3.4bundle update puppet --conservative |
Detection & mitigation playbook
Open-source dependencyDetect
Scan your dependency tree (package-lock.json, pnpm-lock.yaml, requirements.txt, go.sum, etc.) for puppet, including transitive dependencies — a direct dependency you never call can still pull in a vulnerable version.
Fix
Update puppet to 4.10.10 or later, then make sure no transitive (indirect) dependency still pins the vulnerable range — O3 confirms GHSA-vw22-465p-8j5w 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 GHSA-vw22-465p-8j5w can be triaged on real exposure rather than presence alone.
Tailored to GHSA-vw22-465p-8j5w. 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 Product Security has rated this issue as having security impact of Low. This issue affects the versions of puppet as shipped with: * Red Hat Satellite 6. A future update may address this issue. * Red Hat OpenStack Platform versions 6-12. Although the affected code is present in shipped packages, the…
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Satellite 6.4 for RHEL 7 | ansiblerole-insights-client-0:1.5-1.el7sat | RHSA-2018:2927 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GHSA-vw22-465p-8j5w in your dependencies?
O3 Security finds GHSA-vw22-465p-8j5w across RubyGems dependencies, including transitive ones, and its impact-aware SCA ranks findings by whether your code actually calls the vulnerable path.