What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-13151

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 86.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2020-08-05 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-78

Description

Aerospike Community Edition 4.9.0.5 allows for unauthenticated submission and execution of user-defined functions (UDFs), written in Lua, as part of a database query. It attempts to restrict code execution by disabling os.execute() calls, but this is insufficient. Anyone with network access can use a crafted UDF to execute arbitrary OS commands on all nodes of the cluster at the permission level of the user running the Aerospike service.

Affected products

• Aerospike Server: before 4.5.3.21; from 4.6.0.1 before 4.6.0.19; from 4.7.0.1 before 4.7.0.17; from 4.8.0.1 before 4.8.0.13; from 4.9.0.1 before 4.9.0.10; from 5.0.0.1 before 5.0.0.7 — fixed in 4.5.3.21, 4.6.0.19, 4.7.0.17, 4.8.0.13, 4.9.0.10, 5.0.0.7

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Aerospike Server 4.5.3.21, 4.6.0.19, 4.7.0.17, 4.8.0.13. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/160106/Aerospike-Database-5.1.0.3-Remote-Command-Execution.html
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/160451/Aerospike-Database-UDF-Lua-Code-Execution.html
• https://b4ny4n.github.io/network-pentest/2020/08/01/cve-2020-13151-poc-aerospike.html
• https://www.aerospike.com/docs/operations/configure/security/access-control/index.html#create-users-and-assign-roles
• https://www.aerospike.com/download/server/notes.html#5.1.0.3
• https://www.aerospike.com/enterprise/download/server/notes.html#5.1.0.3
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/160106/Aerospike-Database-5.1.0.3-Remote-Command-Execution.html
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/160451/Aerospike-Database-UDF-Lua-Code-Execution.html
• https://b4ny4n.github.io/network-pentest/2020/08/01/cve-2020-13151-poc-aerospike.html
• https://www.aerospike.com/docs/operations/configure/security/access-control/index.html#create-users-and-assign-roles
• https://www.aerospike.com/download/server/notes.html#5.1.0.3
• https://www.aerospike.com/enterprise/download/server/notes.html#5.1.0.3

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