What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2012-1988

• Severity: medium (CVSS 6.0 v2.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 2.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2012-05-29 · updated 2026-06-16
• Weakness: CWE-78

Description

Puppet 2.6.x before 2.6.15 and 2.7.x before 2.7.13, and Puppet Enterprise (PE) Users 1.0, 1.1, 1.2.x, 2.0.x, and 2.5.x before 2.5.1 allows remote authenticated users with agent SSL keys and file-creation permissions on the puppet master to execute arbitrary commands by creating a file whose full pathname contains shell metacharacters, then performing a filebucket request.

Affected products

• Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 10.04, 11.04, 11.10
• Debian Linux: 6.0, 7.0
• Fedoraproject Fedora: 15, 16, 17
• Puppet Agent: from 2.6.0 before 2.6.15; from 2.7.0 before 2.7.13 — fixed in 2.6.15, 2.7.13
• Puppet Enterprise: from 1.2.0 before 2.5.1; 1.0, 1.1 — fixed in 2.5.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Puppet Agent 2.6.15, 2.7.13; Puppet Enterprise 2.5.1. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2012-April/079227.html
• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2012-April/079289.html
• http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/package-announce/2012-May/080003.html
• http://projects.puppetlabs.com/issues/13518
• http://projects.puppetlabs.com/projects/1/wiki/Release_Notes#2.6.15
• http://puppetlabs.com/security/cve/cve-2012-1988/
• http://secunia.com/advisories/48743
• http://secunia.com/advisories/48748
• http://secunia.com/advisories/48789
• http://secunia.com/advisories/49136
• http://ubuntu.com/usn/usn-1419-1
• http://www.debian.org/security/2012/dsa-2451

Get alerted when CVE-2012-1988 or the next vulnerability affects your stack