What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2021-3197

• Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 71.7% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2021-02-27 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-74

Description

An issue was discovered in SaltStack Salt before 3002.5. The salt-api's ssh client is vulnerable to a shell injection by including ProxyCommand in an argument, or via ssh_options provided in an API request.

Affected products

• Debian Linux: 9.0, 10.0, 11.0
• Fedoraproject Fedora: 32, 33, 34
• 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 2016.3.9 before 2016.11.3 — fixed in 2015.8.10, 2015.8.13, 2016.11.10, 2016.11.3, 2016.11.5, 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

• https://github.com/saltstack/salt/releases
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/11/msg00009.html
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2022/01/msg00000.html
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/7GRVZ5WAEI3XFN2BDTL6DDXFS5HYSDVB/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/FUGLOJ6NXLCIFRD2JTXBYQEMAEF2B6XH/
• https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/package-announce%40lists.fedoraproject.org/message/YOGNT2XWPOYV7YT75DN7PS4GIYWFKOK5/
• https://saltproject.io/security_announcements/active-saltstack-cve-release-2021-feb-25/
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202103-01
• https://security.gentoo.org/glsa/202310-22
• https://www.debian.org/security/2021/dsa-5011
• https://github.com/saltstack/salt/releases
• https://lists.debian.org/debian-lts-announce/2021/11/msg00009.html

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