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Fencer Vulns
medium 6.4

CVE-2021-22004 json

Improper Authentication in SaltStack Salt

published 2021-09-08 5 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also GHSA-xf37-qcvf-7m57 , PYSEC-2021-346 , EUVD-2021-0226

cvss
6.4
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.4%
EPSS 0.4% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 29%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

An issue was discovered in SaltStack Salt before 3003.3. The salt minion installer will accept and use a minion config file at C:\salt\conf if that file is in place before the installer is run. This allows for a malicious actor to subvert the proper behaviour of the given minion software.

Patch / fix

  • pypi salt 3003.3
  • saltstack salt 3000.3
  • salt Alpine 3.14 3003.3-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2021-22004

Alpine secdb © Alpine Linux, from https://secdb.alpinelinux.org via OSV; changed: normalised to fixed package versions per release. CC BY-SA 4.0

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2021-22004 updated cvss 6.4

salt: allows malacious actor to subvert the proper behaviour of the given minion software

  • Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 salt, salt-minion
    affected: no fix planned “Out of support scope”

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

0.35% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 29% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 6.4 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 4.4 AV:L/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
GitHub 3.1 6.4 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:H/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
pypi salt
<3003.3
3003.3

Affected products

  • n/a Saltstack Salt

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-362 Concurrent Execution using Shared Resource with Improper Synchronization
  • CWE-287 Improper Authentication

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.