GHSA-pf7h-h2wq-m7pg CVE-2021-21996 PYSEC-2021-318

Exposure of Resource to Wrong Sphere in salt

High PyPI

Severity: 7.5 / 10; High · CVSS 3.1
Exploit chance (EPSS): 3.51%; Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days. Higher than 89.21% of scored vulnerabilities.
Known exploited: No; Not in CISA's catalog
Weakness: CWE-668 Exposure of Resource to Wrong Sphere
Fix: 3003.3; Upgrade salt to this version or later

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 versions

PyPI

Package	Vulnerable	Fixed in
salt	`< 3003.3`	`3003.3`
salt	`< 3003.3`	`3003.3`

How to fix

Move to the fixed version or later with your package manager, update the lockfile, and run your tests. If the package only arrives through another dependency, upgrade that dependency first. If none of its releases pulls a fixed version yet, force the version with your package manager's override.

salt PyPI → `3003.3`

pip

pip install --upgrade "salt>=3003.3"

poetry

poetry add "salt>=3003.3"

uv

uv add "salt>=3003.3"

Severity breakdown

CVSS 3.1 7.5

CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Attack vector: Network
Attack complexity: High
Privileges required: Low
User interaction: None
Scope: Unchanged
Confidentiality: High
Integrity: High
Availability: High

Weakness

CWE-668: Exposure of Resource to Wrong Sphere

The product exposes a resource to the wrong control sphere, providing unintended actors with inappropriate access to the resource.

References

Advisories

Packages

github.com/saltstack/salt

Timeline

Sep 8, 2021 Published
Oct 22, 2024 Last updated by the source
Nov 1, 2026 Latest EPSS score

Advisory	Severity	Why it's related
CVE-2020-16846 SaltStack Salt Command Injection in netapi ssh client	Critical Known exploited	Also affects salt
CVE-2020-11652 SaltStack Salt is vulnerable Arbitrary Directory Access	High Known exploited	Also affects salt
CVE-2020-11651 SaltStack Salt Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution	Critical Known exploited	Also affects salt
GHSA-vcf3-26xf-fw4m Salt Authentication Protocol Version Downgrade Allows Minion Impersonation	Medium	Also affects salt
GHSA-77w2-v593-vxvv Salt junos Module Vulnerable to Code Injection via Specially Crafted YAML Payload	High	Also affects salt
GHSA-8pcp-r83j-fc92 Salt vulnerable to directory traversal attack in file receiving method	High	Also affects salt
GHSA-989c-m532-p2hv Salt's worker process vulnerable to denial of service through file read operation	Medium	Also affects salt
GHSA-7f3f-x5f5-79gw Salt's file contents overwrite the VirtKey class	Medium	Also affects salt

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