GHSA-vpjg-wmf8-29h9 CVE-2023-20897 PYSEC-2023-166

Salt vulnerable to denial of service

Medium PyPI

Severity: 5.3 / 10; Medium · CVSS 3.1
Exploit chance (EPSS): 1.24%; Chance of exploitation in the next 30 days. Higher than 69.29% of scored vulnerabilities.
Known exploited: No; Not in CISA's catalog
Weakness: CWE-404 Improper Resource Shutdown or Release
Fix: 3005.2; Upgrade salt to this version or later

Description

Salt masters prior to 3005.2 or 3006.2 contain a DOS in minion return. After receiving several bad packets on the request server equal to the number of worker threads, the master will become unresponsive to return requests until restarted.

Affected versions

PyPI

Package	Vulnerable	Fixed in
salt	`< 3005.2`	`3005.2`
salt	`>= 3006.0rc1, < 3006.2`	`3006.2`
salt	`>= 3006.0, < 3006.2` `< 3005.2`	`3005.2` `3006.2`

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 → `3005.2`

pip

pip install --upgrade "salt>=3005.2"

poetry

poetry add "salt>=3005.2"

uv

uv add "salt>=3005.2"

Severity breakdown

CVSS 3.1 5.3

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

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

Weakness

CWE-404: Improper Resource Shutdown or Release

The product does not release or incorrectly releases a resource before it is made available for re-use.

How to prevent it

Requirements: Use a language that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid. For example, languages such as Java, Ruby, and Lisp perform automatic garbage collection that releases memory for objects that have been deallocated.
Implementation: It is good practice to be responsible for freeing all resources you allocate and to be consistent with how and where you free memory in a function. If you allocate memory that you intend to free upon completion of the function, you must be sure to free the memory at all exit points for that function including error conditions.
Implementation: Memory should be allocated/freed using matching functions such as malloc/free, new/delete, and new[]/delete[].
Implementation: When releasing a complex object or structure, ensure that you properly dispose of all of its member components, not just the object itself.

References

Advisories

Packages

github.com/saltstack/salt

Timeline

Sep 5, 2023 Published
Jun 17, 2026 Last updated by the source
Oct 31, 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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