What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-16846: SaltStack Salt Shell Injection Vulnerability

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: yes — in CISA KEV since 2021-11-03
• EPSS: 99.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: yes
• Published: 2020-11-06 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-78

Description

An issue was discovered in SaltStack Salt through 3002. Sending crafted web requests to the Salt API, with the SSH client enabled, can result in shell injection.

Affected products

• Debian Linux: 9.0, 10.0
• Fedoraproject Fedora: 31
• openSUSE Leap: 15.1
• VMware SALT: before 2015.8.10; from 2015.8.11 before 2015.8.13; from 2016.3.0 before 2016.3.4; from 2016.3.5 before 2016.3.6; from 2016.3.7 before 2016.3.8; from 2016.11.0 before 2016.11.3 — fixed in 2015.8.10, 2015.8.13, 2016.11.10, 2016.11.3, 2016.11.6, 2016.3.4

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: VMware SALT 2015.8.10, 2015.8.13, 2016.11.10, 2016.11.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-11/msg00029.html
• http://packetstormsecurity.com/files/160039/SaltStack-Salt-REST-API-Arbitrary-Command-Execution.html
• https://github.com/saltstack/salt/releases
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/12/msg00007.html
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/01/msg00000.html
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/TPOGB2F6XUAIGFDTOCQDNB2VIXFXHWMA/
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202011-13
• https://www.debian.org/security/2021/dsa-4837
• https://www.saltstack.com/blog/on-november-3-2020-saltstack-publicly-disclosed-three-new-cves/
• https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/advisories/ZDI-20-1379/
• https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/advisories/ZDI-20-1380/
• https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/advisories/ZDI-20-1381/

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