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Fencer Vulns
high 7.8

CVE-2021-31607 json

Command Injection in SaltStack Salt

published 2021-04-23 5 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also GHSA-hcjf-rp5h-g5h3 , PYSEC-2021-56 , EUVD-2021-0233

cvss
7.8
version 3.1, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
5.9%
EPSS 5.9% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 93%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

In SaltStack Salt 2016.9 through 3002.6, a command injection vulnerability exists in the snapper module that allows for local privilege escalation on a minion. The attack requires that a file is created with a pathname that is backed up by snapper, and that the master calls the snapper.diff function (which executes popen unsafely).

Patch / fix

  • pypi salt 3003rc1
  • cobbler Manager Server Module 4.0 3.0.0+git20190806.32c4bae0-7.22.3
  • tika-core Manager Server Module 4.0 1.26-3.6.3
  • susemanager Manager Server Module 4.0 4.0.34-3.52.3
  • spacewalk-web Manager Server Module 4.0 4.0.28-3.45.1
  • spacewalk-java Manager Server Module 4.0 4.0.44-3.57.5
  • grafana-formula Manager Server Module 4.0 0.2.3-4.16.3
  • spacewalk-utils Manager Server Module 4.0 4.0.21-3.30.3
  • susemanager-sls Manager Server Module 4.0 4.0.35-3.48.3

suse advisories SUSE-SU-2021:2114-1SUSE-SU-2021:2106-1SUSE-SU-2021:2105-1SUSE-SU-2021:2104-1SUSE-SU-2021:2102-1SUSE-SU-2021:14753-1

  • python-distro openSUSE Leap 15.3 1.5.0-3.5.1
  • salt openSUSE Leap 15.3 3002.2-8.41.8.1
  • salt openSUSE Leap 15.2 3002.2-lp152.3.36.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2021:2106-1openSUSE-SU-2021:1951-1openSUSE-SU-2021:0899-1

  • salt Alpine 3.24, Alpine 3.23, Alpine 3.22 +9 more 3003-r0

alpine advisories ALPINE-CVE-2021-31607

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-2021-31607 updated cvss 7.8

salt: Command injection in the snapper module

  • 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

5.92% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 93% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

Exploits and checks

  • sec.stealthcopter.com https://sec.stealthcopter.com/saltstack-snapper-minion-privledge-escaltion/ referenced PoC, tagged "exploit" by a source, unverified

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 3.1 7.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
NVD 2.0 4.6 AV:L/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P
GitHub 3.1 7.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:L/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H

Affected packages

ecosystem package affected fixed in
pypi salt
>=2016.11.0, <3003rc1
3003rc1

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-78 Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command
  • CWE-77 Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in a Command

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.