What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-1930

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.1 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 7.1% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2020-01-30 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-78

Description

A command execution issue was found in Apache SpamAssassin prior to 3.4.3. Carefully crafted nefarious rule configuration (.cf) files can be configured to run system commands similar to CVE-2018-11805. With this bug unpatched, exploits can be injected in a number of scenarios including the same privileges as spamd is run which may be elevated though doing so remotely is difficult. In addition to upgrading to SA 3.4.4, we again recommend that users should only use update channels or 3rd party .cf files from trusted places. If you cannot upgrade, do not use 3rd party rulesets, do not use sa-compile and do not run spamd as an account with elevated privileges.

Affected products

• Apache Software Foundation Apache SpamAssassin: before 3.4.3 — fixed in 3.4.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Apache Software Foundation Apache SpamAssassin 3.4.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-04/msg00003.html
• https://bz.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=7648
• https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/r6729f3d3be754a06c39bb4f11c925a3631e8ea2b4c865546d755cb0a%40%3Cannounce.apache.org%3E
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2020/02/msg00015.html
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/B7SY2LUSH2X3IUXN4EQQ5A6QVUFYIV3D/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/VOVVKFP2G2AF5GHAB4WMHOEX76A3H6CE/
• https://seclists.org/bugtraq/2020/Feb/1
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4265-1/
• https://usn.ubuntu.com/4265-2/
• https://www.debian.org/security/2020/dsa-4615
• http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-security-announce/2020-04/msg00003.html
• https://bz.apache.org/SpamAssassin/show_bug.cgi?id=7648

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