What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-21996

• Severity: high (CVSS 7.5 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 3.5% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2021-09-08 · updated 2026-06-17

Description

An issue was discovered in SaltStack Salt before 3003.3. A user who has control of the source, and source_hash URLs can gain full file system access as root on a salt minion.

Affected products

• Debian Linux: 9.0, 10.0, 11.0
• Fedoraproject Fedora: 33, 34, 35
• VMware SALT: before 3000.3 — fixed in 3000.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: VMware SALT 3000.3. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/11/msg00017.html
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/11/msg00019.html
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/6BUWUF5VTENNP2ZYZBVFKPSUHLKLUBD5/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/ACVT7M4YLZRLWWQ6SGRK3C6TOF4FXOXT/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/MBAHHSGZLEJRCG4DX6J4RBWJAAWH55RQ/
• https://saltproject.io/security_announcements/salt-security-advisory-2021-sep-02/
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202310-22
• https://www.debian.org/security/2021/dsa-5011
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/11/msg00017.html
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/11/msg00019.html
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/6BUWUF5VTENNP2ZYZBVFKPSUHLKLUBD5/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/ACVT7M4YLZRLWWQ6SGRK3C6TOF4FXOXT/

Get alerted when CVE-2021-21996 or the next vulnerability affects your stack