CVE-2011-5098

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2012-08-08 · updated 2026-06-16
Weakness: CWE-264

Description

chef-server-api/app/controllers/clients.rb in Chef Server in Chef before 0.9.20, and 0.10.x before 0.10.6, does not require administrative privileges for creating admin clients, which allows remote authenticated users to bypass intended access restrictions by leveraging read permission for the validation key and executing a knife client create command with the --admin option.

Affected products

Opscode Chef: through 0.9.18; 0.5.1, 0.5.2, 0.5.4, 0.5.6, 0.6.0, 0.6.2 (+27)

References

http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-2649
https://github.com/opscode/chef/commit/33f0e9c58bbf047e1b401a834f3abfe72d9a8947
http://tickets.opscode.com/browse/CHEF-2649
https://github.com/opscode/chef/commit/33f0e9c58bbf047e1b401a834f3abfe72d9a8947

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