CVE-2020-1740

Severity: medium (CVSS 4.7 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2020-03-16 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-377

Description

A flaw was found in Ansible Engine when using Ansible Vault for editing encrypted files. When a user executes "ansible-vault edit", another user on the same computer can read the old and new secret, as it is created in a temporary file with mkstemp and the returned file descriptor is closed and the method write_data is called to write the existing secret in the file. This method will delete the file before recreating it insecurely. All versions in 2.7.x, 2.8.x and 2.9.x branches are believed to be vulnerable.

Affected products

Debian Linux: 8.0, 10.0
Fedoraproject Fedora: 30, 31, 32
Red Hat Ansible: before 2.7.17; from 2.8.0 before 2.8.11; from 2.9.0 before 2.9.7 — fixed in 2.7.17, 2.8.11, 2.9.7
Tower: through 3.3.4; from 3.3.5 through 3.4.5; from 3.5.0 through 3.5.5; from 3.6.0 through 3.6.3
Red Hat CloudForms: 5.0
OpenStack: 13

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Red Hat Ansible 2.7.17, 2.8.11, 2.9.7. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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