CVE-2022-29186: Use of Hard-coded Cryptographic Key in rundeck/rundeck, rundeckpro/enterprise

Severity: critical (CVSS 9.8 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2022-05-20 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-321

Description

Rundeck is an open source automation service with a web console, command line tools and a WebAPI. Rundeck community and rundeck-enterprise docker images contained a pre-generated SSH keypair. If the id_rsa.pub public key of the keypair was copied to authorized_keys files on remote host, those hosts would allow access to anyone with the exposed private credentials. This misconfiguration only impacts Rundeck Docker instances of PagerDuty® Process Automation On Prem (formerly Rundeck) version 4.0 and earlier, not Debian, RPM or .WAR. Additionally, the id_rsa.pub file would have to be copied from the Docker image filesystem contents without overwriting it and used to configure SSH access on a host. A patch on Rundeck's `main` branch has removed the pre-generated SSH key pair, but it does not remove exposed keys that have been configured. To patch, users must run a script on hosts in their environment to search for exposed keys and rotate them. Two workarounds are available: Do not use any pre-existing public key file from the rundeck docker images to allow SSH access by adding it to authorized_keys files and, if you have copied the public key file included in the docker image, remove it from any authorized_keys files.

Affected products

rundeck: before 4.1.0 — fixed in 4.1.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: rundeck 4.1.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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