What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2020-11651: SaltStack Salt Authentication Bypass Vulnerability
- Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: yes — in CISA KEV since 2021-11-03
- EPSS: 96.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: yes
- Published: 2020-04-30 · updated 2026-06-17
Description
An issue was discovered in SaltStack Salt before 2019.2.4 and 3000 before 3000.2. The salt-master process ClearFuncs class does not properly validate method calls. This allows a remote user to access some methods without authentication. These methods can be used to retrieve user tokens from the salt master and/or run arbitrary commands on salt minions.
Affected products
- Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 16.04, 18.04
- Debian Linux: 8.0, 9.0, 10.0
- openSUSE Leap: 15.1
- VMware SALT: before 2019.2.4; from 3000 before 3000.2 — fixed in 2019.2.4, 3000.2
- VMware Application Remote Collector: 7.5.0, 8.0.0
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: VMware SALT 2019.2.4, 3000.2. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
- http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-04/msg00047.html
- http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-07/msg00070.html
- http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/157560/Saltstack-3000.1-Remote-Code-Execution.html
- http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/157678/SaltStack-Salt-Master-Minion-Unauthenticated-Remote-Code-Execution.html
- http://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2020-0009.html
- https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/topics/releases/2019.2.4.html
- https://github.com/saltstack/salt/blob/v3000.2_docs/doc/topics/releases/3000.2.rst
- https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/05/msg00027.html
- https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-salt-2vx545AG
- https://usn.ubuntu.com/4459-1/
- https://www.debian.org/security/2020/dsa-4676
- http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-04/msg00047.html
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