CVE-2014-3248

Severity: medium (CVSS 6.2 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2014-11-16 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-17

Description

Untrusted search path vulnerability in Puppet Enterprise 2.8 before 2.8.7, Puppet before 2.7.26 and 3.x before 3.6.2, Facter 1.6.x and 2.x before 2.0.2, Hiera before 1.3.4, and Mcollective before 2.5.2, when running with Ruby 1.9.1 or earlier, allows local users to gain privileges via a Trojan horse file in the current working directory, as demonstrated using (1) rubygems/defaults/operating_system.rb, (2) Win32API.rb, (3) Win32API.so, (4) safe_yaml.rb, (5) safe_yaml/deep.rb, or (6) safe_yaml/deep.so; or (7) operatingsystem.rb, (8) operatingsystem.so, (9) osfamily.rb, or (10) osfamily.so in puppet/confine.

Affected products

Puppet Facter: 2.0.0-rc1, 2.0.0-rc2, 2.0.0-rc3, 2.0.0-rc4, 2.0.1, 2.0.1-rc1 (+3)
Puppet Hiera: before 1.3.4 — fixed in 1.3.4
Puppet Marionette Collective: before 2.5.2 — fixed in 2.5.2
Puppet Agent: before 2.7.26; from 3.6.0 before 3.6.2 — fixed in 2.7.26, 3.6.2
Puppet Enterprise: from 2.8.0 before 2.8.7 — fixed in 2.8.7
Puppetlabs Facter: from 1.6.0 through 1.6.18

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Puppet Hiera 1.3.4; Puppet Marionette Collective 2.5.2; Puppet Agent 2.7.26, 3.6.2; Puppet Enterprise 2.8.7. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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