CVE-2017-7481

Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 4.8% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2018-07-19 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-20

Description

Ansible before versions 2.3.1.0 and 2.4.0.0 fails to properly mark lookup-plugin results as unsafe. If an attacker could control the results of lookup() calls, they could inject Unicode strings to be parsed by the jinja2 templating system, resulting in code execution. By default, the jinja2 templating language is now marked as 'unsafe' and is not evaluated.

Affected products

Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 16.04, 18.04, 19.04
Debian Linux: 9.0
RedHat Ansible Engine: before 2.3.1.0; from 2.3.2.0 before 2.4.0.0 — fixed in 2.3.1.0, 2.4.0.0
Red Hat, Inc. Gluster Storage for RHEL 6: 3.2
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.18: 3.3, 3.4, 3.5
OpenStack: 10, 11
RedHat Storage Console: 2.0
RedHat Virtualization: 4.1
RedHat Virtualization Manager: 4.1

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: RedHat Ansible Engine 2.3.1.0, 2.4.0.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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