CVE-2018-11746: Puppet Discovery can leak authentication information

Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2018-07-03 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-522

Description

In Puppet Discovery prior to 1.2.0, when running Discovery against Windows hosts, WinRM connections can fall back to using basic auth over insecure channels if a HTTPS server is not available. This can expose the login credentials being used by Puppet Discovery.

Affected products

Puppet Discovery: before 1.2.0 — fixed in 1.2.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Puppet Discovery 1.2.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rd0e44e8ef71eeaaa3cf3d1b8b41eb25894372e2995ec908ce7624d26%40%3Ccommits.pulsar.apache.org%3E
https://puppet.com/security/cve/CVE-2018-11746
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/rd0e44e8ef71eeaaa3cf3d1b8b41eb25894372e2995ec908ce7624d26%40%3Ccommits.pulsar.apache.org%3E
https://puppet.com/security/cve/CVE-2018-11746

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